


132 Hours

by destinies



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: (but with guns), Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Kidnapping, Past Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Rape Culture, Slow Burn, The Author Regrets Everything, The Author Regrets Nothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:23:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 52,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27703408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinies/pseuds/destinies
Summary: When a car accident claims the lives of her parents, Jude Duarte and her twin sister Taryn—both omegas—are swept away by their half-sister's father and raised among the alpha upper crust of society. It sounds like something out of a fairytale. It is a nightmare.Years later, after graduating at the top of her class from an exclusive, formerly alpha-only private school, Jude bumps into her nemesis at a party in the Hamptons and is mistakenly taken along when he's abducted for ransom. Now trapped together in a tiny cell, Jude and Cardan Greenbriar must get along in order to escape their kidnappers or face the consequences: injury, death, or whatever happens when Jude goes without suppressants for over two days.
Relationships: Jude Duarte/Cardan Greenbriar
Comments: 556
Kudos: 778





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First: If this is your first exposure to A/B/O dynamics, I apologize in advance.
> 
> Second: You wouldn't be getting this chapter if not for [Luna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkofthemoon)'s fantastic betaship. Thank you so much! Additional thanks to [Nicky](https://amandlas.tumblr.com) for being my patient Jude consultant.
> 
> Third: This is a fic that deals with heavy themes, because of the kidnapping and being held for ransom, and because a lot of the A/B/O worldbuilding deals with a form of rape culture even more sinister than our own. **So, if you would prefer not to read any of the following, feel free to skip this fic** : abduction, drugging, allusions to substance abuse, discussion of physical abuse, attempted sexual assault (not by either of our protagonists) or eventual discussion of PTSD.

My twin and I have barely spoken all summer.

“It’s about a stupid alpha boy,” I overhear our older sister Vivi say on the phone to her art school girlfriend one day, when she thinks I’m not listening. “They’ll get over themselves.”

But we don’t. If I can, I leave the room when she enters. When I can’t, mostly mealtimes, it’s tense and quiet. Just once I want her to follow after me, to apologize, to fight, to say _something_ , _any_ thing—but she never does. Until one of our last weekends away in the Hamptons, when she comes into my room without knocking and launches herself onto my bed, jostling the mattress when she lands on her back.

“There’s a party tonight,” Taryn tells me breathlessly.

I barely look at her. All summer I’ve wanted to have a sister again, but now that she’s the one acting like we can just go back to normal, I refuse to engage her on her terms. I stay where I am, propped up on my pillows with my laptop on my crossed legs. I say, “There’s parties every night.”

“It’s in East Hampton. Basically next door.” Taryn turns onto her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows. “We should go.”

I keep scrolling through Twitter. “You know I don’t like parties.”

“You don’t like _high school_ parties,” she corrects. “You don’t like parties where everyone’s somebody we’ve known since we were eight. This is a _real_ party. College boys. _Older_ boys.”

I peer at her over my laptop. “Don’t you have a boyfriend?”

She nudges my foot. “You don’t.”

Sighing, I set my laptop on my nightstand, careful not to spill either of my water cups or knock over my stack of books, getting ahead of what I think I might need to read in my first semester of pre-law. Then I crawl out onto my stomach and lie perpendicular to her. “I don’t want a boyfriend.”

My twin wrinkles her nose. It’s weird to look at her and think that we’re technically identical. She’s pretty, with amber eyes and soft brown curls, whereas I feel like mine are tangles that never behave. And the way she moves her face is different. Sometimes Vivi will point out our quirks—the way we turn our heads in unison, how our scowls are the same—but I would never stick out my lower lip the way she’s doing now.

“What about fun?” she suggests.

“Oh, God.”

“I’m serious.” She pokes my side. “You deserve to have fun.”

“A party, huh.” I roll over onto my back, staring at the canopy above my bed. It’s a lavender color that I picked out when I was ten, when Madoc married his new wife and bought the house out here—for her, kind of, but also so we could chill out and do kid stuff, like splash around on the beach and roast s’mores over a fire pit. I’d outgrown lavender, and a twin bed, but it remained here, in the summer house in Amagansett. “It better not be one of the ones where you have to pay at the door.”

“Omegas drink free,” Taryn says, nearly sing-song.

I glare at her. “ _We_ are underage. _We_ don’t drink anything.”

“Jude, college is in just a couple of weeks,” Taryn protests. “Don’t you want to take a chance to, I don’t know, do something stupid first?”

I chew on my lower lip to keep from saying what we both know well: stupidity is for alphas. Stupidity gets omegas killed.

She continues to pout at me, and as I try to puzzle out why she’s being so adamant about this, I realize that she doesn’t just want to do something stupid—she wants to do something stupid _with me_. She thinks maybe this will be the way to mend the rift between us that cracked open at prom. And even though everything about this plan smacks of danger, she might be right.

Nothing about the last few months has been normal. Maybe we have to do something aggressively normal to try.

So, fine. If she wants to go to a house party crawling with alpha douchebros to feel pretty and wanted for a night, it’s fine. I’ll be trailing behind her, glaring at anyone who gets too close and keeping her from ending up a cautionary tale on _Law and Order: Designation Crimes Unit_. And by the end of the night, maybe we’ll be closer for it.

“Stupid fun’s on the menu?” I ask. It doesn’t really sound like me. I have been careful for almost as long as I can remember. I have been careful since my parents died, and the times I have not been careful, bad things have happened. I don’t see myself changing my ways.

“Why not?” says Taryn.

And against the thousand and one reasons, I bite my tongue.

* * *

It is one of those parties where they charge a door fee, but as Taryn promised, we don’t have to pay. Omega girls usually get in free as long as we look somewhere in the range of eighteen _ish_ , even if the IDs that proclaim us twenty-one are obviously fake. Taryn hands ours over to the guy at the door and stands there smiling in her short sundress—she’s wearing actual shorts underneath, _obviously_ , we’re not idiots. He just looks us over and says, “Twins, huh?” then hands our IDs back and waves us inside.

It’s a beautiful house, one of those grand, large, older-style mansions that’s been updated to modern standards but has still kept some of its charm. The foyer alone is eye-popping. Over ten years of having money, technically, and although I’m used to being around wealth, I am still conscious of all the ways I don’t fit in this world. I come into a house like this and feel like an impostor. I wasn’t born into it. I have my slot because Vivi has a different biological dad. That’s all.

Taryn looks totally at ease, though. She nudges me with her elbow to snap me out of it. “Let’s get something to drink,” she says. We both did our makeup, but I stuck to what I know—winged eyeliner sharp enough to cut—while she went for a trendy smoky eye. Everything about her is a little softer than me. She’s got her dress, and I’m wearing hard-to-remove distressed jean shorts (they were hard enough to put on) and a scowl that says _stay back_.

There’s a DJ, because of course there is, playing loud top 40 hits with a subwoofer that gives them all a growling purr. An open bar, because of course there is. But mostly the place is crawling with bodies. Taryn’s right that there are college guys here—some with university names emblazoned on their sweatshirts, since the nights do get cool out here—and other, older guys, the younger generation of junior finance bros and consultants who flee the city for open-air parties.

Taryn makes her way through the crush of bodies to order a screwdriver. I get a Coke in an unopened can, untampered with, that immediately starts sweating in my hand. I am sweating, too. There are too many people.

When I turn back around to tell Taryn we should go somewhere less crowded, I find that she’s already pushed out into the crowd. Her hair, brown with an auburn shine, is all I can see of her between the unfamiliar heads and shoulders. I feel a swell of panic and push it down. It’s not time to panic. There is never time to panic.

With sharp elbows and heavy feet, feeling a new wave of revulsion whenever a stranger’s sweaty skin slaps against mine, I make my way out of the crowd around the bar just in time to see Taryn’s yellow heels on one of the curved staircases leading up to the second floor. I swear under my breath and follow. It isn’t the last time I’ll swear tonight.

Because when I finally catch Taryn again on the second floor landing, she’s not alone.

“Hey, Jude,” Locke says with a little jostle of his red Solo cup which, I guess, is a stand-in for a wave. His other arm is around my sister’s waist. And Taryn is looking up at him with the same puppy-dog eyes I saw her give him on prom night, when I finally caught on.

Locke, the guy who tried to date both of us at the same time. Locke, now Taryn’s terrible boyfriend. That Locke.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I demand.

He shrugs and gives me a grin that burns like acid. I can’t believe it ever worked on me. “Company’s so good, how could I be anywhere else?”

“Go knot yourself.”

“Hard feelings, then?” He takes a drink from his red cup.

Taryn’s eyes are large, almost pleading. She knows there is no reasoning with me on this. “Jude. It’s okay.”

“Did you know he’d be here?” I demand.

She chews on her lower lip, which tells me everything. “I just thought—”

“If you thought I’d want to kiss and make up, you thought wrong. I don’t even want to be in the same house as this guy. I’m leaving. You’re coming.”

Taryn’s mouth presses into a stubborn line. “No. I’m staying. And you should too.”

I roll my eyes.

“Jude.” She tries to grab my hand, but I step back. She sighs. “You really could have fun. Meet somebody. You don’t know.”

I shake my head. “I _do_ know, actually. I know I don’t want this. You do you, I’ll do me. That’s how it should have been in the first place.”

Taryn and Locke look at each other, and something passes between them that I don’t understand. Then, Locke nods. “All right. I won’t let Taryn out of my sight.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

He holds up the hand that had been resting against Taryn. “I know better than to get on your dad’s bad side, Jude.”

I hate to admit it, but Taryn probably _is_ safer with Locke. Sure, she has a one hundred percent chance of making a piss-poor decision, but with an alpha she has real protection. I can handle myself—Madoc saw to that—but it doesn’t matter, not in this house. Taryn and I are two hens in a den of foxes.

So I lean in close to Locke, not breaking eye contact. “If anything happens to my sister, our _dad_ will be the least of your worries.” I force a smile, pop the tab on my soda can, and take a defiant swig. “Have a great night.”

Then I flip him off and head back down the stairs.

The air here is oppressively horny. Alphas and omegas alike douse themselves in pheromones to be more attractive to the opposite designation. The scents mingling in the air make me sweat, and my nose itches. The omega smells don’t do anything for me, and most of the alphas make me want to retch. I’ve only ever thought a few of them smelled good. Locke himself was slightly to the right side of bearable. But the only one who really did anything for me was the worst of them all.

Even as I think of him, I feel like I catch his scent, dark and rich, on the air. But that’s impossible. He couldn’t be here.

Unless… dread prickles at the back of my neck. Locke is here. That could mean—

And because the universe is cosmically conspiring against me, that is the exact moment that I nearly stumble down the stairs and right into Cardan Greenbriar’s chest.

He’s sweating a little. We both are. I can see the individual beads of moisture on his neck as if my vision has suddenly sharpened. The smell of him fills my nostrils. He smells like coffee, like chocolate, like good red wine, all of those things and none of them and something darker and muskier. He smells like everything you know is bad for you but want anyway. He smells decadent. And _rich_.

If we didn’t have years of bad blood between us, I’d want to bury my nose in his neck. As it is, I kind of want to puke. I reel back from him until I am pressed against the bannister, as far away as I can get without going down any more stairs. He makes me weak at the knees, which is an unfortunate chemical thing. A little of my Coke has sloshed onto his black shirt.

“What the hell!” I yell over the music.

Cardan is momentarily confused, but blinks it away. He does not look nearly as surprised to see me as I am to see him. In fact, he always looks good, even better than he smells, which I find deeply unfair. “Jude. Hey.”

“What are you doing here?”

He gestures with the cup in his hand. It’s clear plastic, not red, and full of some dark liquor and perfect square ice cubes. He’s classy that way. “Well, it’s a party.”

“Did my _sister_ set this up? Did you set this up?”

To my astonishment, Cardan looks mildly horrified. His mouth opens and closes, like he’s a stupidly attractive fish. And that tells me all I need to know.

“Forget it,” I say, turning my head away from him. I breathe in deeply through my mouth so I can’t smell anything. I can already feel my face flushing, my heart beating faster. Just an effect of the pheromones. I’ll be fine as long as I get away from him, and soon. I push off the bannister and head down the stairs. It’s a huge mansion, but I still don’t want to share it with Cardan fucking Greenbriar.

I can’t leave without Taryn, though. I don’t entirely trust Locke to get her back before morning, when our dad will flip his lid. So I figure hanging out behind the house is my best bet. There will be a pool, in all likelihood, and a fire pit, and we’re close enough to the water that the stretch of beach back there is almost definitely private. Space to get away from all of the other alphas and omegas crammed into this house. Space to get away from him.

While I am elbowing my way through the kitchen, I suddenly smell an extra-strong whiff of alpha musk, the bad kind. My heart begins pounding in my chest, and I go woozy in the worst way, the revulsion way. Then an arm encircles my waist, and a male voice says in my ear, “Hey, little Omega. Where are you running off to?”

My mind goes white with panic. The guy is alpha-bro strong—I can feel his pecs pressing into my back, his biceps straining from the effort of keeping me caught—and if I were most other omegas this would probably be it. The pheromones would overpower me no matter how good or bad I thought they smelled and the kitchen island is right there and he could bend me over it and everybody at this party would think it was consensual or not care either way.

But because I am me, and defective in so many ways, I stomp on his foot and jam an elbow into his gut for good measure. He makes a choked sound and lets me go, and I nearly fall flat on my face before I manage to take a half-step and plant my foot. I look behind me. It’s some guy I don’t know, probably college-age. He’s got rumpled brown hair and is wearing an NYU sweatshirt and an ugly expression.

“ _Bitch_ ,” he snarls.

I push past a tall alpha girl who has her face buried in the neck of a shorter omega dude. The back door is so close. I have to get out. I have to get _out_.

When I finally push out into the cool fresh air, I almost start crying.

The night is clear. I run away from the house, past the chlorine blue pool, past the fire pit with its half-circle of chilly worshippers. Moonlight glimmers on the distant waves of the blue-black ocean. If I look up, I can see stars—more than I can see in the city, anyway. The entire scene is so disgustingly beautiful that I want to scream. It’s like nature is just another thing that’s mocking me.

I slow when I reach the beach proper and stop in damp sand, briefly considering taking off my sandals and wading into the water. I wonder if it would cool me off. But nothing can cool me off. I’ve known that for a long time.

There’s a little fire in me that I have learned to nurture and conceal, to let burn brightly enough to fuel my drive but not so brightly that I’ll start ripping off the heads of every shitty alpha I meet, starting with my classmates. In its one hundred year history, Insmire Academy had never taken omega students, although there was never anything in the charter forbidding it—it was just how things were. Taryn and I were the first omegas to ever graduate those halls, spiting jerks like Cardan who would sneer and tell us we’d never make it that far. Tell us worse. Try worse. Do worse.

On graduation day I got to look down from the podium as I gave my valedictorian speech and temper my little fire so I didn’t tell everyone exactly what I thought of them. My eyes still sought out Cardan, who had somehow managed to defy alphabetical order and sit with his friends, who snickered and jeered and whispered to Nicasia as I spoke. Even though I was up on stage and he was down with everybody else. Even though I had proven myself in ways he hadn’t, in ways that I thought mattered.

I mean, they mattered. They matter. An omega girl—a brown omega girl with a tragic backstory—graduating at the top of her class from one of the most famously elitist alpha academies on the East Coast? Of course it matters. It matters to the newspapers who ran that story, crowing about designation equality. It matters to colleges, who were eager to shower me in scholarships that I don’t need. And, of course, it matters to my adoptive dad, who put his hand on my shoulder and told me he was proud of me, which is about as close to an “I love you” as I ever get from him. But it didn’t matter one whit to the people who’d hurt me most.

When I think it should be enough, it never is.

No, cold water won’t do anything. Plus, I don’t want to go home with sandy feet. That would only make my terrible evening worse. So I turn and begin walking down the beach away from the house, until even the teeth-rattling bass begins to recede behind me.

“Jude.”

I spin around. Cardan is making his way down the beach, toward me, skidding a little when one of his feet slips on the sand. He still holds his plastic cup, but he doesn’t seem to have trouble walking in a straight line. Maybe the fresh air sobers him up, or clears his brain of pheromones or whatever.

I turn my back on him. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Yeah, I get that. But hear me out—”

He has the audacity to put a hand on my shoulder and looks shocked when I slap it off, whirling around to face him. “You don’t _touch_ me,” I hiss. “You don’t lay a finger on me. Understand?”

It feels so good to say. I had so few chances to do it without facing dire consequences from our teachers or his friends when we were in school together. Cardan blinks at me again, struck briefly and blessedly dumb. “Uh, yeah,” he says. He holds up his empty hand and the one holding his drink, as if to say he means no harm. Like I would ever believe that. “Okay, clearly you _don’t_ want to talk to me.”

I snort. “Guess you’re not used to taking no for an answer.”

“Just let me get it off my chest and then I’ll leave you alone. Deal?”

I sigh. He hasn’t done anything to deserve my time, but if I stalk off down the beach he’ll probably follow me. That alpha sense of entitlement. This will be the fastest way to get him off my back. “Fine.”

Cardan takes a drink from his cup, then says, “Wow, that is not remotely strong enough. Okay, so—” He blinks. “Um.”

“What, Greenbriar?”

“No,” he says, and he’s not looking at me but behind me. “We were alone a second ago, right?”

I do not look. “It’s anyone’s beach,” I say, even though that is probably not true.

“Yeah, but—”

“Look, you’re drunk and I’m not in the mood for bullshit. Say your piece and go.”

But Cardan is staring now, and because he’s freaking me out, I start to turn, too.

Then someone presses a rag over my nose and mouth, and I don’t get my wits about me in time to not breathe in. A sweet, pungent smell fills my nostrils and I think _Oh shit_ because I know it’s too late to act. I try to kick whoever’s snuck up behind me, but I already feel dizzy and nearly topple over. A male voice swears, and I feel the press of the rag over my nose and mouth again.

I try the foot trick again, the elbow jab, but whoever they are deftly dodges me. I struggle, but it’s useless. The dizziness gets worse. Somewhere distant I hear Cardan trying to speak, or yell. When I listen harder, it sounds like he is yelling my name.

 _That’s weird_ , I think.

It’s the last thing I think for some time.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Say ‘please?’”
> 
> “Fuck off, Greenbriar.”
> 
> “Close enough.”

This is the shape of my nightmares:

My sister Taryn and I are thirteen years old, sick and miserable. We’ve just endured our first heats and stayed home from school for a week with doctor permission. Even now, we feel residual awfulness: headaches and sore muscles. Heats are painful when there’s no one to help you through them, and obviously we’re too young to mate. We sheltered in our rooms, and our adoptive father briefly hired an omega nurse to tend to our high temperatures and help us wrap up in blankets, so at least we felt safe and cocooned.

Everybody knows why we missed school, and they whisper about it behind our backs. Even before we presented, our designation was obvious. The rest of our class—the rest of the school—is alpha kids, and the ones in our year have all started growing out of their baby fat, shooting up like wheat stalks. Taryn and I are only barely taller than we were last year, our cheeks are still soft, and we are gaining weight in our hips and chests. Everything about this is awful. Nothing is fun.

We are outside for gym class. The alpha kids, growing into their bodies, have a lot of extra energy, so they need to spend time circling the track or tackling each other in games of capture the flag. Taryn and I will join them until we get tired, but if we show signs of flagging, we’re benched. Omegas aren’t as sturdy. Omegas break.

Today, the teacher is more generous. During our game of capture the flag, she simply mandates we play defense, guarding the precious flag, and abstain from running around with our classmates. It’s boring, but fine. We get to talk to each other while the alphas tussle among themselves upfield.

Except a few of them are “on defense” today too—the alpha elites, too lazy or too important for gym, who can slack off. As the only two omegas on school grounds who aren’t staff, Taryn and I are categorically beneath their notice, but we know every member of the clique by name: Locke, the son of a wealthy consultant who’s never home, always traveling; Nicasia, whose mom is a senator; Valerian—nobody knows what his family does so we all kind of assume it’s crime; Cardan, the youngest of six heirs to the most absurd family fortune this side of the Rockies.

Already, they are taller than us, stronger than us, looking unfairly sculpted in the autumn sun. Already I am aware of how we are different.

Then the wind blows past me, picking up my hair. And the scene changes.

The first thing I notice when Cardan unexpectedly strides toward me is that he smells amazing. He smells so incredible that I goggle at him for a second, baffled by how I somehow didn’t notice this about him before. I feel a clenching in my stomach and the urge to do _some_ thing, although at the time I don’t know what. And then, while I am paralyzed by his scent, he gives me a hard shove for no reason, knocking me off-balance.

I land on my backside, an embarrassing but safe place to land, padded with muscle and fat. Our adoptive father always taught us that it’s better to land there than anywhere else, better to suffer a little humiliation than to crack your skull open or shatter your ankle or wrist. It still smarts, but at least the only thing bruised is my pride.

Then Valerian throws his head back and laughs. “That’s where she belongs,” he crows. “On her back, like a good little omega.”

Nicasia thinks that’s hilarious. Locke raises his eyebrows, blinking at us with large, tawny eyes. And Cardan, the instigator. Cardan just sneers.

That sneer has haunted me. I’ve seen it countless times since then. He starts holding his nose when he passes me in the hallway. Whenever I get complacent, he makes sure to whisper in my ear that I reek. He and his friends seem to find it more fun to bully the alphas smaller or weaker than them—omegas already know their place, after all—but that does not protect us when they’re bored, or when said alphas further down the food chain need to take out their own aggressions.

I think they thought it would break me.

They couldn’t know it would do the opposite.

* * *

“Jude?”

I open my eyes to a darkened room, and groan. I feel vaguely like I’ve been run over by a truck, then the truck stopped and someone picked me up and threw me in the back of it, and we proceeded to drive down a very bumpy road. In other words: like shit. My head throbs, and when I try to sit up, the world spins and I flop back over.

“What happened?” I mutter. Everything is greyish and blurry. Dim light seems to be filtering in from somewhere above my head and to the left, but there isn’t very much of it. I hold my hand up in front of my eyes and squint at it until I stop seeing double.

There’s a relieved sigh from somewhere past my hand. A male voice. “You’re okay.”

I make a second attempt at sitting up and am more successful this time. My shoulder scrapes against a wall to my right, so I lean into it. The light source I clocked before is a small window, longer than it is wide, set high up above me. And on the other side of the room, sitting across from me, is the dark shape of a boy, or a man, or someone caught eternally in between those two things.

Cardan.

I blink at him. “You look like shit.”

“Yeah, you too.” Cardan rubs his eye. He isn’t sneering now. In fact, he looks worse than I’ve ever seen him. His hair is messy—which is nothing new, people are doubtless running their hands through it all the time with how perpetually tousled it seems—but there are circles under his eyes and he looks pale. He’s also bleary-eyed and squinting a little. He doesn’t seem to have any visible injuries, though, although jury’s out on whether that’s good or bad. I’ve often thought he could stand to get pushed around a little more, instead of always being the one to do the pushing.

“I gave you the mattress,” he says, gesturing at what I’m sitting on. “There was only one.”

I look down. I’m indeed sitting on a mattress. There are no linens, but someone has thrown a slightly scratchy blanket over the lower half of my body. I peer around, dread sinking in as I begin to grasp the severity of our situation. “Oh, _fuck_.”

“I think it’s ransom,” Cardan volunteers. “I mean, I really can’t think of anything else it would be.”

I hug my arms to my chest and say the thing drilled into every omega’s brain since they’re old enough to wander off from their parents. “What about sex slavery?”

“Yeah, there’s not a huge demand for alpha men on the black market. Although…” He looks down at himself and smirks a little. He’s built like a classical sculpture and he is well aware of this fact. “Can’t blame them if they decided to make an exception.”

It’s impossible to think he’s making a joke about this, not when it’s actually a thing that could happen _to me_ , a possibility that my stepmother Oriana warned us of ever since she married Madoc and inherited his adopted twins. Sex slavers looking to snatch up omega girls became our bogeymen.

But the odds are that Cardan’s right: it’s probably ransom. I imagine people would do and have done worse to get their hands on a fraction of the late Eldred Greenbriar’s billions.

But I say, “Maybe someone finally got tired of you being annoying as shit.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Feeling mouthy, are we?”

“Fuck _off_. This is your fault,” I accuse, wagging a finger at him. “You did this.”

Cardan blinks at me. “What, you think I kidnapped my _self_?”

“Not literally.” I slump back against the wall. “Although it seems like something you would do. You love attention.”

“Ah, yes. All of the attention I am getting from you in our cozy eight-by-ten cell. I’m just soaking it in.” He pantomimes splashing water on his face. “Great for the skin.”

“You’re in a playful mood.” But of course he’s feeling better than me. He would have needed a larger dose—of the chloroform? ether? they used on us to get us here—but he also would have bounced back quicker. Everything about alpha biology is kind of extra like that.

“I joke a lot when I’m nervous.” He sighs and runs his hands through his hair. “I am actually freaking the fuck out.”

“Oh, great.”

“I do have water, though. Thought that might interest you.”

I sit up a little straighter. “God, my head is killing me. Yes.”

“Say ‘please?’”

“Fuck off, Greenbriar.”

“Close enough.”

Instead of getting up, which I think for a moment he might, he rolls the half-empty bottle of water across the floor and over to me. It bumps against the edge of the mattress and I have to lean over to grab it, which nearly makes me hurl then and there. The water helps, though. It’s room temp, but even a mouthful makes me feel more like a person.

“It’s not drugged,” Cardan calls. “Surprised you didn’t ask in advance.”

I flip him off. After I’ve drained the last of the bottle, I let myself just breathe, counting backwards from ten in my head. There are many warring emotions vying to tip me over the edge of a panic attack, but I can’t let them. I have to get out of here.

Cardan flicks at a bit of dust on the floor. When I am on three, he interrupts my mindful breathing. “You realize that, technically, we have now swapped saliva?”

“Ew.” I throw the empty water bottle at him and am annoyed when he catches it effortlessly from the air. “Could you be, like, useful for once in your life?”

“Sure.” He leans forward and lowers his voice, like he’s afraid someone might overhear. “There are three of them. One’s a woman, I _think_ the other two are men. The only one I’ve seen is tall and white and barely spoke a word to me. He dropped off the water when I was still groggy.”

That _is_ useful. Dammit. I frown. “Designation?”

“Dunno. Couldn’t get a read on him. I think they might be using maskers for their scents.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I exhale. “Tall” doesn’t have to mean alpha—my sister Vivi, who’s shorter than me, is proof enough of that. But it doesn’t sound good. “Any idea where we are?”

“I don’t think we’ve left Long Island. I don’t know for sure, though. We could be in Jersey for all I know.”

“Right.” I sigh again and rub my temples. “Okay, so ransom. Ransom. You could technically pay the ransom yourself, right? You’re over eighteen—”

“I’m twenty.” When I blink at him, he clarifies, “Repeated sixth grade, remember? And I just had my birthday in July.”

How could I forget? My life wasn’t exactly blissful before he came along, but it definitely got worse when he got bumped down to my year. “Okay, you’re twenty, and your dad died last year. So you’ve got your own money now.”

Cardan raises his eyebrows. “Wow. Real considerate.”

Now is definitely not the time to quibble over manners, but I manage, “Sorry, I guess.”

“Don’t be. He was a dick.” I glare at him, but he ignores me, patting down the pockets of his skinny jeans. “Huh, you know, when they took my phone and my wallet, they must have also taken the special checkbook I keep on me _just_ for hostage situations. Think they’d accept Venmo?”

“Very funny.”

“But the real issue here is that I can’t touch my trust until I turn twenty-one.”

I wish I could say that didn’t interest me, but it does. Sure, Madoc has money. He’s a ruthlessly efficient attorney with killer instincts, and, among other prominent clients, he’s represented Cardan’s dad and both of his older brothers at one point or another. But he’s not among the alpha _ultra_ -rich. Private helicopter rich. Secluded island rich. And I’m nosy enough about how the point one percent of the one percent lives. Anyone would be. So I ask, “Why’s that?”

“Why did my dad do anything?” Cardan folds his hands behind his head. “To make my life difficult, I guess. It was probably to ensure I wouldn’t embarrass myself by buying and crashing seventeen Porsches in a row. Give that frontal lobe time to develop. He’s not here to say. Anyway, Balekin’s the trustee. Maybe there’s some clause about life-threatening emergencies.”

Balekin is Cardan’s oldest brother, but thinking about siblings makes me wonder, with a pang in my chest, about Taryn. What had she done when she and Locke couldn’t find me at the party? Had she panicked? Had she gotten home safe? I don’t want to think about Madoc because he’s probably freaking out in a big way, a side of him I have only seen once before, the last time someone threatened me. It’s more likely that he’ll tear the kidnappers limb from limb than give into anybody’s demands. I hope Balekin has a more level head, although given his reputation for throwing massive parties, I am not counting on it.

“Right,” I say. “So they’ll hit up Balekin for the money?”

“Dude, I don’t know. Honestly? He might have staged this himself to get at the trust, or more likely my stake in the corporation. In some ways, I think it’s better for my family if I disappear.”

It surprises me to hear him say that. “Wouldn’t—that would be a huge scandal, though?”

I don’t say what I think, which is _Don’t they love you_? But there’s a pretty big age gap between Cardan and his oldest siblings. They could be practically strangers for all I know.

Cardan just shrugs and looks gloomy.

“I don’t think they planned on getting me, too,” I say quietly. There’s only one mattress in the room. One bottle of water on hand for when Cardan woke up. And anyone who thinks they can extort “Mad Dog” Madoc is definitely biting off more than they can chew. But that curdles my stomach, because if Cardan hadn’t chased me down the beach, I probably would have woken up in my lavender canopied bed, safe. Probably with a killer headache from overstimulation, but safe. As safe as I can ever be.

“Yeah,” Cardan agrees, which doesn’t help me feel any better. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

I blow out a breath. “Well, Balekin better pay up in the next forty-eight hours, or we need to figure out how to get out of here. Otherwise we’re going to have problems.”

“We are?”

I swallow. I hate that I have to spell it out for him. But I keep my voice even, casual. “Unless you’ve got spare heat suppressants on you.”

Cardan looks dumbstruck. “Oh,” he says after a moment. “Shit, no. I must have left them in my other jeans with my hostage checkbook.”

I feel myself blush, which is ridiculous. Unregulated heat cycles, messy and inconvenient as they are, are nothing to be ashamed of, as everyone says. Just a quirk of biology. Just the way I am. There’s even a group of pretty radical omega activists out there fighting to destigmatize unregulated cycles, citing the damage that suppressants can wreak on the body. Except my designation is going to be pretty problematic if I’m locked in this room with Cardan for reasons other than societal stigma.

To be honest, it’s already a problem. The room is probably ten feet long, not long enough for us both to lie down across from each other without curling up to avoid touching. I am already hyper-aware of his presence, the nervous drumming of his long fingers, the terrible urge I have to run my fingers through his already messy curls. It’s just chemistry, but if it’s bad now, it’ll be about eighty times worse for both of us if I go into heat.

And if any of our captors are also alphas…

I shake myself all over. I can’t go down that road. I’ll never pull myself back. I’ll just curl up in a little ball and then it’ll be up to Cardan to save us, which, no thank you. “Yeah. So, one way or another we have to get out of here.”

Cardan goes pale. “Jude, I—”

“So we assume nobody’s coming,” I continue. “Use the next twenty-four hours to figure out as much as we can about the people who’ve taken us and where we’re being held, and the next twenty-four to escape. That’s the plan.”

“That’s a reasonable plan,” he says, vaguely startled.

“You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

“I’m not. You were valedictorian, of course you have a plan. Just, uh, my mind went totally blank when you pointed out you’d—”

“We don’t have to talk about it, okay?” I snap. “I assume you want that just as much as I do.” Which is not at all.

The way he pales further tells me I’m not far from wrong. I mean, he’s always made it clear how much he’s hated my scent, the way I look, the fact that I get better grades than him. He hates pretty much everything about me, because I am an omega and he is an alpha, and that means he should be on top of the world and I should know my place.

I massage my temples, trying to clear my head. “No, we’re going to get out of here before that happens.”

For reasons I can’t pretend to understand, that seems to reassure Cardan. He nods and unfolds his arms, letting his head fall back against the wall. His eyes close. “Okay.”

I am surprised that he seems at all willing to trust me, but I suppose he is pretty low on options. That’s his mistake. Already I am thinking of what a relief it will be to leave him behind, even though I know that, morally speaking, I should be formulating an escape plan for the both of us. Besides, abandoning Cardan to his fate wouldn’t really solve any of my problems. But I wouldn’t have to face his sneer anymore, wouldn’t have to wonder what it would take to convince him I have earned my place when the answer is clearly “Nothing, ever.”

“I just have to figure out how,” I mutter under my breath.

Cardan cracks one dark eye open to look at me, but I ignore him, staring up at the little window. There has to be a way to crack this place open like a nut, and if there is, I’ll find it. There is no other option but this, no other way but out.

I refuse to believe otherwise.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Let me step on your back,” I say abruptly.

“Sherlock Holmes.”

I barely have to think about it. “Sherlock Holmes was an omega.”

“No.” Cardan sounds totally affronted. “No way. How can you even say that?”

For lack of anything better to do, we have been playing this game for nearly an hour. Mostly fictional characters, but some historical figures, too, who are up for debate. As much as alphas would love to lay claim to every known conqueror, it just isn’t realistic. Cardan and I have already gone back and forth on Alexander the Great and Ivan the Terrible and Ghengis Khan. Designations live in a kind of middle space between gender and sexual orientation, so people make assumptions based on the way you present in society, but also whether you’re an alpha, an omega, or a mythical beta is, technically, no one’s business but yours. So, especially in older stories, these things go unsaid or are discreetly left for the reader to surmise.

“Why would he be an alpha?” I challenge.

Cardan is sitting in his corner, one leg propped up, elbow on knee. He shrugs. “I mean, he feels empowered to take charge in crime scene investigations, he’s assertive—”

“You’re thinking of the BBC reboot,” I scoff. “The way Conan Doyle wrote his Holmes wasn’t like that. He was an expert, yes, and knew it, but he admitted it when someone bested him, and he went out of his way to help vulnerable people. People who had been scammed, or… single women.”

As bad as it seems for omegas and women—especially omega women—now, it would have been even worse in the stratified Victorian era. We still have our strata, but they were more codified then:

  1. Alpha men
  2. Alpha women/omega men (depending on the situation)
  3. Omega women



And, of course, it was all way worse when race and class got thrown in. The point is that someone like Violet Smith of “The Solitary Cyclist”—a woman, assumed omega, and poor—would have been in real trouble without Holmes’ help.

“So he’s an omega because he’s nice to widows?” Cardan asks, with a glare.

“No, he’s an omega because he _pays attention_ ,” I reply. “Alphas don’t need to pay attention the way Sherlock Holmes does. You just waltz in and traipse all over whatever or whoever and always get your way. Who cares about the details when you’re an alpha? But Sherlock Holmes looks hard at the little things. You don’t do that if you don’t have to, if you’re not used to walking into a room and assessing threats, figuring out the balance of power. All the time. Because it’s exhausting, but you have to do it.”

Cardan is quiet for a beat too long, and I realize I may have actually said more about myself than about Sherlock Holmes. But he spares me by saying, “Surely we’re not all that bad.”

I make a noncommittal sound.

“Your dad’s an alpha, right?” he continues. “He took you and Taryn in after your parents died. He didn’t have to do that.”

I have to keep myself from snorting. No one who’s met Madoc would ever describe him as particularly nice or even giving. “Did you know Vivi has a pet conspiracy theory that he killed our parents in the first place?”

“What?”

“Not himself, obviously. That he hired someone to sabotage the car we were in.” I don’t know why I tell him. The second it leaves my mouth it feels like a family secret, or an in-joke I’m not supposed to share. But I can’t stop talking. “I mean, it was just luck we weren’t killed, Taryn and Vivi and I. But my parents’ car was new. The brakes shouldn’t have given out like they did. Anyway, Vivi thinks he took us in because he felt guilty.”

“I mean, that’s… crazy to think your dad was involved.” But Cardan says it too slowly, and hastens to add, “He isn’t a supervillain.”

“Yeah, I know. Just with everything that happened after, the way he swooped in, she was always suspicious.” I feel my mouth twitch, but I don’t know whether I want to smile or scowl. “I think she wanted us to be like The Boxcar Children and run away to live in the woods.”

“Well, you’re getting the one-room, no-running-water experience now.”

I catch myself smiling—he’s funny—and force my mouth into a frown, scouring our little room again for anything useful. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Even the socket that would hold a bare lightbulb is empty. Finally, my eyes settle on the one tiny window, set close to the ceiling, letting in a meager amount of natural light that does seem to have grown brighter as we talked.

“Let me step on your back,” I say abruptly.

“You want to _what_?”

“Step on your back,” I repeat, exasperated. “Are you tall enough to reach that window without a stool?”

“No?”

“Well, neither am I.” I fold my arms. “So I’m going to need you to give me a boost.”

He arches a critical eyebrow. “Why don’t you just sit on my shoulders?”

I blink at him. “Because… I thought you wouldn’t want to put your head anywhere near my crotch? Given how I _reek_ and all.”

“But you thought I’d want to be stepped on? Jesus.” Cardan rubs a hand over his face. “What do you think I’m into? Look, I’ll crouch down, you get on my shoulders and look out the window. It’s not like I’m putting my face in your vag.” I shudder, and he adds, “We’ll never have to talk about it again. Okay?”

“Sounds great to me,” I say.

He nods and crouches down. I am not prepared for the way my heart thumps in my chest at the sight of the guy who made my life miserable since I was in seventh grade, who pushed me during gym, who whispered vile things in my ear whenever he could, who empowered other kids to do the same or worse waiting for me to climb onto his shoulders with his head bowed. It’s not real power, it’s just temporary, but it is _intoxicating_.

Then Cardan says, “Taking your time, huh?” and I snap out of it.

“Why the rush?” I ask. “Got somewhere to be?”

“I was thinking anywhere but here would be great.” He looks up at me. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I swing my legs over him and let him hoist me up on his shoulders. I haven’t exactly been invited to participate in a ton of games of chicken fight in the pool, so it’s been some time since anyone carried me like this. Maybe not since Taryn and I were very small, just after our parents died, when Madoc would help us get things from high kitchen shelves. I gasp when I’m lifted. Cardan is strong enough that it seems effortless, but I also hear him let out a small grunt.

“Not a word,” I say, dreading the jab he might make about my weight. “Move me closer to the window.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Cardan mutters, but he obliges.

I am extremely conscious of his hands on my bare thighs, the way his muscles shift under my shoulders. Some alphas, like the guy who tried to grab me at the party, are kind of muscle-bound in an unattractive way. Not Cardan. Cardan has just the right amount of muscle to be fit and lean, with a bare minimum of body fat, but not so much that he tips over into ungraceful. He’s a sports car of a person, lithe and elegant. It’s no mystery why his shirtless TikToks get so many views.

I get my hands on the windowsill so he’s not bearing my full weight, and then I groan. “Bad news.”

“What?”

“Well, I definitely can’t fit through here. I can kind of see the sky, so I would guess it’s maybe ten a.m. Otherwise there’s just a window well. Plastic and dirt. I can’t make out our surroundings at all.” I sigh. “We’re in a basement.”

There’s an awkward pause, and then Cardan says, “At least we know for sure.”

“Yeah. Put me down?”

He does, and we go back to our respective seats, mentally reviewing what we know. The only door is, of course, locked from outside. The floor is bare concrete, the ceiling exposed insulation and tubing, so we might be in a storeroom of some kind, or an unfinished basement in an older house. Our kidnappers left us with absolutely nothing, so no phones. Even my keychain, with the Swiss army knife Madoc gave me before my first summer at sleep-away camp, is gone.

We are growing hungrier and more sullen with each passing minute when there is a knock at the door.

Cardan and I glance at each other from our opposite sides of the room. “Um,” I say. Are kidnappers supposed to be polite?

Cardan shrugs one shoulder, then straightens up, lifting his chin in a decidedly imperious way. Trying to summon some air of command, some macho alpha-ness that will help us out of this. It could work—it is half working on me, I begrudgingly admit to myself, because my stupid brain is wired that way—if we weren’t both grimy from sitting on the floor and still a little woozy from the drugs.

“Come in,” he calls.

The door is opened slightly, and the first thing to poke through it is the barrel of a pistol. A 9mm, by the looks of it. Cardan’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.

“You kids willing to behave?” comes a voice. It’s a man’s voice, strangely melodious. I was expecting the sandpapery roughness of an old-school gangster. I know it’s stereotypical, but I’ve never been kidnapped before, and it’s not like they make a manual.

Cardan and I glance at each other again. I’m not sure what we’re looking to find in each other’s faces.

“Yeah,” I say. “We’re good.”

“Oh, good. I’d hate to shoot you.” The man pushes the door open the rest of the way, and I have to press my lips shut to keep from gasping. There are disfiguring scars that cut across his cheeks, down his jaw, even one across the bridge of his nose. I’m not even sure what makes scars like that, jagged and rough-edged. If it was a knife, it wasn’t clean work. Someone was making a point.

I am immediately relieved, though, because his resonant voice had made me think we could be dealing with a real alpha, someone whose words hold command. This man is of average height, average build. If not for the scars, for the obviously broken nose, he would be totally unremarkable.

“Who are you?” Cardan asks. I am reluctantly impressed that he manages to sound haughty in this situation. He’s sitting up straight with his back against the wall, one leg outstretched, the other bent, his foot planted on the floor. He’s resting his elbow on that knee, like it’s all effortless.

“Breakfast service,” replies the man, still pointing the pistol at us. He tosses a McDonald’s bag into the room, then he and the gun retreat, and the door shuts behind him. We hear the click of a lock and then, to my horror, the sound of a deadbolt sliding into place.

Cardan exhales and reaches for the bag.

“Don’t!” I exclaim. “Seriously, it might be drugged.”

“It—what?” he asks. “Now you decide to care about whether the food is drugged? This isn’t _Flowers in the Attic_ , Jude. We’re hostages. They want to ransom us. They’re not going to poison us.”

I blink at him. “ _Flowers in the Attic_? You’ve read a book?”

He rolls his eyes and reaches for the bag. “Well, if you’re not going to eat it, I will.”

When he opens the bag, the smell of sausage grease and egg hit me like a truck. My stomach growls. I am suddenly very aware that the last time I ate was before the party, and my nerves had kept me from eating much then. “What… is it?”

“Two McMuffins.” He looks up at me. “See? They don’t want to starve us. They’re keeping us alive.”

“They could still tamper with them. Sedatives or something. Keep us complacent, keep us from doing what we’re going to do, which is try to escape.”

Cardan arches an eyebrow. “Has anyone ever told you you’re unbelievably paranoid?”

I think of Taryn and purse my lips. “Did you know it wouldn’t kill you to take something seriously?”

He holds up one hand, fingers spread wide. “Okay. How about this. I eat a McMuffin because I am fucking starving, and if they put anything in it it’ll get me and work through my system faster. You can stay up scheming or whatever. If nothing happens after like fifteen minutes, you get to eat yours. Or if you decide to be stubborn, I’ll eat it. Deal?”

“It’ll be cold and gross.” I cross my arms. “But fine.”

“Good.” Cardan takes a McMuffin out of the bag—his hands are so big that it barely looks like enough food for him—and devours it in what must be record time. I turn my head away.

“Where’s the nearest McDonald’s, do you think?” I ask.

“Huh?”

“We were in East Hampton. They don’t have one there.”

“Uh-huh. That’s a good point.” I look back to see Cardan sucking grease off his thumb. “Dunno. Closer to the middle of the island, maybe?”

“Maybe,” I echo quietly. Without knowing how long we were out, it seems impossible to figure out where they could have taken us. “You’re right. We couldn’t be in the city.”

Cardan shakes his head. “Nah, don’t think so. Too quiet, and like you said, that’s definitely daylight, so people’d be out and about.”

“Yeah,” I say, looking up at the window.

He looks at the window, too, but doesn’t say anything, and we lapse into silence. It’s strange, to be sharing space with him, to be quiet. I could never have imagined anything like it, not with our fraught history. There’s no world in which Cardan Greenbriar and I could be friends, but, at least temporarily, we are not enemies.

“Did you like it?” I ask at last, when the silence stops being neutral and begins to make me feel anew how tired and tense I am.

“Like what?”

“ _Flowers in the Attic_.”

“Oh.” He blinks twice, his dark eyelashes fluttering. “I read it a few years ago, but, yeah. I did. You know, it was nice to read about a family that was more fucked up than mine.” He raises his eyebrows. “Spicy, too.”

I scoff. “How can your family be so fucked up you’d read a gothic novel for catharsis?”

Cardan drums his fingers on his knee. “How much do you know about my family?”

“You’re old money. One of those alpha families that claims they’re pure alpha for generations.” Which is pretty much impossible, but everyone in that tier of society tells the same lie. Half the kids in my school claim to be pure alpha, and on paper both of their parents are alphas. But while alpha men and women _can_ reproduce—they have the right gametes—it’s not easy. More likely omega egg donors, and, before that, omega surrogates who were well-paid. It’s no wonder they see us as breeders.

I start ticking off additional facts on my fingers. “Your great-grandfather was one of the great American magnates, but it was his alpha daughter, Mab Greenbriar, who really made something of his millions. Your dad was her only son, so he inherited the whole corporation. You have five older siblings: Balekin, Elowyn, Dain, Caelia, Rhyia—”

Cardan holds up both his hands. “Yeah, yeah. I get the point.”

“It’s all on Wikipedia.” I shrug, and to sound less like a weird stalker, I add, “And Vivi and Rhyia are like best friends.”

“You know, and I know you said it before, but I do forget Vivienne’s your sister. She’s so cool.”

I roll my eyes. “Thanks.”

I get it, though. He probably thinks Vivi’s cool because she’s an alpha, but she also gets points for being the family rebel. Her biological dad, Madoc, adopted us all after the car crash that killed our parents, but she never wanted to be the natural successor he hoped for. Now she plays rugby at an all-girls’ college, has three cartilage studs and a septum piercing, shaves half her head, and is defiantly, unapologetically queer. It’s a different path than I would take, but marching to the beat of your own drum is definitely something that appeals to people.

“By the way,” Cardan says, “it’s been a few minutes and I feel fine. Well, as fine as one can feel having eaten only one McMuffin. I don’t feel any worse.”

“Okay.” I hold out my hand. “Toss me the bag.”

The bag crinkles when he picks it up, then he looks inside. “I think I’m owed a poison taster’s fee.”

“Huh?”

Cardan takes my McMuffin out of the bag, takes a bite out of it, then drops it back in the bag, which he proceeds to lob at my head. I catch it, face wrinkling in disgust. “Ew!”

“What? I need the calories more.”

I shake the bag at him. “I am not eating this,” I huff.

“We split the water bottle. That didn’t kill you.” Cardan sits back against the wall and closes his eyes. “Besides, who knows when they’re going to decide to feed us again?”

“You’re all so gross,” I mutter as I open the bag and pull out my breakfast. He’s right, and I hate that he’s right. I also hate that my hunger is enough to overcome my revulsion, at both the stolen bite and the undeniable fact that my McMuffin is now cold. I stuff it in my mouth, devouring the rest of it in only a few bites.

“Who’s gross?” he asks. “Alphas? _Boys_?”

“Alpha boys,” I inform him, with my mouth full.

“Big words from somebody whose designation’s known for leaking fluids everywhere.”

I fold my arms over my chest. “We’re not the only designation that _leaks_ ,” I point out. “We’re just the only one that gets shit for it. We’re the ones who’re thought of as gross while you and your type get to go around ruling the world.”

“Oh, sure. That has nothing to do with the way you guys are totally incapacitated for three straight days if you don’t take your drugs.”

“If we don’t get out of here, you’ll be just as screwed as I am,” I snap. “Stuck in a room with me? You won’t have a chance. We’re both going to become brainless fuck machines if that happens, so… shut the hell up.”

He does, to my surprise. I do too. I wipe my greasy hands on the McDonald’s bag, then crumple it into a little ball and toss it into the corner of the room. My anger is a living thing, running through my veins like electricity, vibrating under my skin. It’s been there for so long, but I would never have dared to say that to his face before. The rest of our situation is so absurd, so dire, it feels like there are no consequences for mouthing off at him.

That’s dumb, of course. There are always consequences. But at least they won’t be coming anytime soon.

“‘Brainless fuck machines,’” Cardan whispers quietly, and then he snickers.

“You—shut _up_ ,” I say, feeling unlikely mirth bubbling at the corners of my mouth. Cardan lets out another huff of laughter, and then I am giggling, and he’s laughing outright, clutching at his stomach. It’s ridiculous, all of my nerves coming out like that, but he’s laughing and it feels like there’s nothing for me to do but laugh too.

“Oh, man,” he says, wiping at his eyes. “I didn’t know you were a _poet_.”

“I’m serious!” I squeal, my abs cramping from laughing and trying not to laugh harder all at once. “That’s what happens!”

“God.” Cardan lets his head fall softly into the corner. “We are so screwed.” He points one finger up in the air. “Metaphorically. So far.”

“Jesus.” I cover my face with both of my hands. “ _Je_ sus.”

“Jesus was an alpha.”

I peek at him through my fingers. “He was not. He literally said ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega.’”

“I’m just fucking with you.” Cardan grins, his hair flopping in his face, but then his cheer vanishes abruptly. “Wait, you’re not actually religious, are you?”

I shake my head. “Not really.” But I still know that common theology holds that Jesus—and angels, and any other holy beings I don’t know about—are not alphas or omegas, but they aren’t betas, either. They are all things and nothing. Must be a good life. I pull my hands down and squint at him. “Were you worried about offending me?”

“Me?” Cardan shakes his head to toss his hair out of his face. “Nah.”

“Well, good.” I cross my arms again. “Because you’ve never cared before, and it’d really freak me out if you started now. Then I’d know we were both losing it for real.”

“I just thought…” He shrugs. “I mean, it’d be nice if one of us believed in something. That praying could help. I’d like to believe that. Seems tidy.”

“Yeah.” I let my cheek fall against the cold wall, too, and blink away the memories of screaming at the night sky, demanding someone give me my parents back. I can’t fall into that pit. I will not.

I just say, “I stopped believing that anyone was listening a long time ago.”

Cardan scratches at the wall with his finger. “Me too, Duarte,” he said. “Me too.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I think I have a plan.”

“You know what?” I ask abruptly, some time later.

Cardan picks up his head. “What?”

“I need to use the bathroom.”

His brow furrows, and then he looks vaguely panicked for the first time. “Um, right. Well, it’s not a big space, but I can turn around—”

I sigh. “No. Why don’t you go knock on the door and ask them to take me outside?”

Cardan blinks at me. “Oh,” he says. “You don’t want to try that yourself?”

“You’re the alpha.” I shrug. “They’re more likely to listen to you than to me.”

“Huh. Yeah. Good point.” He looks at me a little longer, head cocked, and then a grin breaks across his face like a sunrise. I feel my cheeks warm and hate that some cruel trick of fate assures that even though I know he is one of the world’s worst human beings, a small, primal part of me will always find him attractive. “How’s it feel?”

“How does what feel?”

“Bossing me around. Seems to come pretty naturally to you.”

I roll my eyes. I don’t need anyone else reminding me that I’m the world’s worst excuse for an omega. Being valedictorian sealed that. Valerian sealed that. My smart mouth sealed it, too. “Shut up, Greenbriar.”

His grin widens. “That the best you got?”

I glare. “Stop talking if you want the part of you that apparently makes you so ‘superior’ to me to remain intact.”

“A little vague, but we’ll workshop it.” Cardan pushes himself to his feet. With his long legs, it only takes him two strides to cross the room to the door. He glances at me. “If they shoot me, it’s your fault.”

“I’ll cry big, fat tears at your funeral.”

“You’d better write a kick-ass eulogy. You’re a good speaker, right? I don’t really remember graduation.”

 _Probably drunk_ , I think. _Or high_. “Can you just knock?”

Cardan raises his hand and deals the door three hard raps, so loud I nearly jump. He waits a beat, then says, “Oh, no answer. Well, I guess I’ll—”

“What is it?”

This time it’s a woman’s voice that comes through the door. Cardan and I glance at each other. “Bathroom,” he calls. I notice the way he instinctively pitches his voice a little lower, trying to sound more adult, more alpha. “Both of us. And I’m thirsty.”

There’s another pause, then the woman says, “Step back, then. Against the far wall.”

Raising both his hands, Cardan retreats until his back hits the wall. I stand, too, awaiting whatever might happen when the door opens.

But when it does, I am momentarily taken aback. A small woman stands there, holding a different pistol, one better suited to her hand than the man’s. Like the scarred man, she too has a distinct appearance: her brown skin is dappled white from vitiligo, and her hair, too, is a shocking white cloud of curls around her face. She’s pretty, I realize. Totally out of place holding a gun in a hostage situation.

She _is_ holding a gun, though—smaller than her companion’s, so they aren’t trading off—and keeps it fixed on Cardan even when she looks at me. “You first,” she says. “Through the door. Come on.”

I do need to pee, but this is what I really want: a chance to get a glimpse of the space outside of our small room. I nod and take cautious steps, edging myself around her and out of the door, careful not to make any moves that would seem threatening and spook her into firing that gun. But she keeps it trained on Cardan until I am out, which is when she finally turns away from him.

She keeps the barrel of her pistol aimed at me as she secures both locks, and I look around. It is a larger open area and in the middle is a round plastic table with four chairs. In one of the chairs sits the scarred man, playing Solitaire. He looks up. “What’s this?”

“Bathroom break,” says the woman, taking my arm. It’s comical—she’s tiny, barely comes up past my shoulder—but she’s the one with the weapon. I let her lead me through the main space, which is mostly bare. Aside from the table and chairs, I see a mini-fridge plugged into one wall, and stairs that lead out of the basement.

I hope my escort is going to take me upstairs so I can get a sense of the situation, but I am not that lucky. Instead she steers me past the tables to a short hallway on the other side of the main space. There are two doors, and she motions me toward the first one.

“In there,” she says.

I don’t thank her, because what point is there in thanking my abductor? I just open the door and go inside. The bathroom is just a bathroom, but it has toilet paper and a functioning toilet and a sink and paper towels, which is all I need at the moment. There is also a shower stall in the corner with a frosted glass door, which makes me think that this is the basement of a house after all. The room we are being kept in might have once been a very small guest bedroom, or a storage room.

Someone has left bar soap in a little tray in the sink. It looks old and grody, its color faded to an unattractive pale green, but I soap my hands up anyway after I finish my business, and then I splash water on my face. I always keep a spare elastic around my wrist and use it to pull my hair, now an unruly tangle of loose curls, back from my face. I am glad I thought to wear a sweatshirt over my black tank top—I’ll probably need that to stay warm when night falls. I stare at my face in the mirror until my vision splits, and then shake my head. I cannot crack now. I _can’t_. I will get through this. I have been through worse. A terrible car wreck, a rocky transition to a new home, years of bullying that culminated in something worse. I can survive this, too.

So I go back outside, where the woman takes me by the arm and leads me back to my prison. I don’t protest. I am quiet, and hopefully look dazed and a little scared. No one can know I’m already planning to escape, that I still have my wits about me.

My escort undoes the locks, then pushes me back into the room, and, with the gun trained on Cardan, she says, “All right. You next.”

Cardan, who had taken up his position in the corner again, scrambles to his feet. His eyes flick over me, head to toe, like he’s judging me for looking disheveled when he himself isn’t much better off. I listen for the click of the locks, and am only a little disappointed when I hear them.

Blessedly alone, I sit on the edge of the mattress, inventorying what I know. The main obstacle will be whatever lies upstairs, but I don’t think there is any way to convince our captors to take me out for fresh air. Maybe I can claim a condition? Asthma? I doubt they would buy it.

It only takes a couple of minutes for the door to open and Cardan to come back in, the small woman at his back. He holds a bottle of water fresh from the mini-fridge, condensation already gathering on its surface. I am glad to see the water, hoping I can steal a swig and banish the greasy feeling of cold McMuffin from my mouth once and for all.

“In,” the woman urges Cardan, and he takes another step inside the room so he’s well clear of the door. I think it’s weird that he doesn’t protest, or talk back to her like he did to me, but he had been stalling then, and now there’s actual danger.

I am starting to realize that when he doesn’t hold power in a situation, Cardan Greenbriar is kind of a coward.

This should make me feel smug, but I would rather have a brash alpha to use as a shield while we make our escape. It’ll be fine. Alpha or not, hopefully I have enough brashness for the both of us.

The woman looks from me to Cardan, then back to me. Her eyes look almost kind. “I am sorry about this,” she says. “We were only meant to take him.”

“Um,” I say. “Oh.”

“It shouldn’t be too much longer.”

“That’s… good.” I look at Cardan, who seems as baffled as I am. “You could always just let me go?”

The woman sighs. “The boss says it’s not an option anymore. But don’t worry. If you keep cooperating, you won’t be in any danger. Either of you,” she adds, looking at Cardan.

“Good to know,” Cardan says. “Although I’m not sure why I should trust the promise of a person who kidnapped and drugged us.”

Her lip twitches. “Fair enough,” she says, and then she closes the door and locks it.

We both exhale our relief. Cardan sits back down in his corner, takes a large swig of water, then screws on the cap and rolls the bottle across the floor to me. “Good thinking,” he says. “One, because it would suck to have to pee on the floor, but two because now we have a sense of where we are.”

“Yeah,” I said, only half-paying attention. I unscrew the bottle cap and take a sip of cool, clean water. Then I lower my voice. “I think I have a plan. But…”

Cardan sits forward. “But?”

“I don’t know if it’ll get you out.”

He frowns, but somehow doesn’t sound surprised when he just says, “Oh.”

“Haven’t you noticed? They’re only scared of you. They only train the gun on you. They don’t think of me…” I shrug one shoulder. “Well, at all, but definitely not as a threat. I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As far as they know, I chose the wrong boy to kiss on a beach.”

“Yeah.” Cardan rubs a hand over his face. “Yeah, okay. So I’m the big, bad alpha… and the decoy, while you slip under the radar. And then I get to follow you, _maybe_. If we’re lucky.”

I am surprised to find that I feel a little bad for him. A few hours ago, I would have been fine leaving him to rot, but then we spoke more words to each other than we have maybe in our entire lives, and now I’m not so sure. I say, “You probably get to follow me, it’s just not a guarantee. But I still think it’s worth trying.”

“Anything is,” he says, surprising me. “You know why?”

“Why?”

“They’re not wearing masks.”

I stare at him for a moment, then dread pools at the bottom of my stomach, a cold egg someone’s cracked open in my chest. “Either they’re consummate professionals who’ve managed to wipe themselves from every database, or…”

“Or we’re not supposed to be around to tell anyone what we’ve seen.” Cardan’s mouth presses into a thin line, grimmer and more serious than I’ve ever seen him.

“Okay,” I say, trying to ignore my heartbeat as it speeds up. “Okay, let’s—okay. So we make our plan and carry it out. That’s what we do.”

“We carry out our plan,” he says, a gloomy echo, “or die trying.”

Silence falls over the room like a blanket of snow, but I take a flamethrower to it by asking, “ _Really_?”

“What?”

“Being dramatic doesn’t help. We have to focus on getting out of here. So.” I wave my hand. “Stop that. No one’s going to kill you, except maybe me if you keep getting on my nerves.”

He looks at me, his eyes darker now, in the unlit basement, than they were even last night on the beach. “Who’s going to stop them from killing us? _You_? A little omega girl who doesn’t know when to quit?”

“I’m not little,” I snap. God, why is he like this? “And yeah, it’s a good thing I don’t know when to quit, because apparently that’s all that stands between you and suicidal sulking. So stop being so Shakespearean tragedy and help me.”

“I could never do theater,” Cardan muses aloud, letting his head fall back against the wall. “Wasn’t alpha enough for me, apparently.”

I frown at him. “Plenty of alphas do theater. Our school had a great theater program.” I would know—I volunteered as a stagehand enough times as a freshman and sophomore. It was something else to put on a college application, and I liked moving in the dark, not being seen but making everything run smoothly. But eventually I had to stop, too. Madoc never said outright that it was a waste of time, but…

“My brother didn’t like it,” Cardan says, like he’s finishing my thought. He picks at some loose plaster on the wall.

I end up just looking at him for a minute, mostly because I am shocked to hear him sound wistful. I didn’t know he was capable of it. “I think you would have been good,” I say, surprised to find I mean it. I mean, he has the looks, and he’s certainly proven to have a flair for the dramatic.

He turns his head to look back at me, and just like that we had zigzagged back from enemies, or rivals, or whatever we were, to allies. “I always thought so, too.”

* * *

“So,” Cardan says. “I stand in the door.”

“You do,” I affirm. “You make sure that whoever opens the door, all they see is you.”

“And you’ll be beside the door, out of sight,” he recites. “So you can grab them, disarm them, and pull them in.” He blinks at me. I’ve begun to notice the gold edging his near-black irises, the whole spectacle framed by dark eyelashes. I feel like if I look long enough, I might be able to pick out other colors in them. Eyes like black opals.

“ _Jude_ ,” he says, like it’s the second time he’s said my name. “Earth to Duarte, hello. Can you actually do that?”

I blink too, shake out of it. “In theory.” I’ve only had to use what I’ve learned on martial arts mats or in boxing studios a few times outside of my lessons, and never on anyone actually armed. But I’m relatively small, so I’ve been taught specifically how to go against people stronger, taller, faster. And I’ve only ever frozen once.

“What if it’s two of them at the door?”

“It won’t be. It’s been one at the door, one at the table all day. You noticed too, right?”

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “So, the tricky part. You lock person one in the room, I go for whoever’s at the table.” He sneers. “‘Go for.’ Like, what, a linebacker?”

“Again, you’re an alpha.” I did not in my life ever think I would be giving Cardan a pep talk, much less this pep talk. “Use those reflexes.”

“My reflexes are rusty.”

“You’d better oil them fast.”

He exhales audibly. “Okay. So I grapple with—whoever’s at the table, under the hope that they’re surprised enough when their buddy gets grabbed that they’ll be slow getting out the gun. And if they do?”

“You’re too valuable to kill until they have your money.”

“They could _wound_ me.”

I roll my eyes. “ _I_ could wound you. Suck it up.”

Cardan chuckles softly and touches his side like he’s already imagining bruises blossoming there. “Ouch.”

“You’ll only be without me for a few seconds,” I reassure him. “You draw focus, keep them on the ground, and then I’ll show up, hopefully armed. Then we’re good.”

“And if we’re not good, you just leave me. You just run.” He gives me a weirdly intense look. “Right? I’m the one they want, anyway.”

“It won’t come to that,” I say.

“But if it does.”

“Cardan.”

“I have concerns.”

I bite the inside of my cheek before I can tell him he’s an idiot if he doesn’t have concerns. “What are they?”

“The third man. I haven’t seen him since yesterday, and you haven’t seen him at all. We know what the other two are like, but you have no read on him and I don’t really trust mine.”

That is a good concern, although I’m loath to give Cardan any credit. It had crossed my mind too, along with the possibility that Cardan might have been too drowsy while he was coming out of his drugged haze and made a mistake. But even if he was in a stupor, it isn’t likely that he mistook a scarred man of medium height or a short woman for a tall man with no scars at all.

“Maybe he’s the ringleader,” I suggest. “He might have left once we were settled in.”

“Might have,” Cardan agrees, but he sounds unconvinced.

We pass the rest of the day like that, in our precarious truce. When one of us has an idea, we speak up, trade it back and forth for a while. And then silence again. It would be incredibly boring, and almost is without my phone, except that Cardan is right: this might be literally life or death.

Our captors let us out a few more times to use the bathroom. In the evening, they bring us cold, dry pre-packaged deli sandwiches from a supermarket and an extra pillow and blanket for Cardan, because I am on the mattress and there was only supposed to be one of us. Cardan just accepts the bedding and food, quiet for once. I know he’s wondering the same thing I am: whether they still mean to kill us, or whether we’re worth more alive.

When the light has totally vanished from our tiny window and we have both exhausted our store of potential plans, Cardan unties his shoes, props his pillow in the corner, and starts making himself as comfortable as possible on the floor.

“What are you doing?” I ask, before my brain catches up to my mouth.

“I think this is called ‘sleeping,’” he replies. “I thought everybody did it, but I guess with all those AP classes and mock trial and…”

I roll my eyes. “It’s a big enough mattress,” I say. “Just don’t touch me.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.” I scoot to the side of the mattress, the one closer to the wall, and turn onto my side, away from the spot I’m vacating for him. “Before I change my mind.”

Cardan seems to realize I actually do mean it, so about half a second later I feel him crawl onto the mattress and flop down. And just as he’s groaning, “God, that _is_ better,” even though the mattress is old and stained and doesn’t smell great, I realize I’ve made a gigantic mistake, because my body is a live wire and not even for the reason he’d think.

I glance over my shoulder at him, and although it’s hard to make out details in the dark, I can see that he is also on his side with his back to me, his midnight curls a stark contrast against the pillow. _Breathe_ , I tell myself. For about five years, Cardan could not have been clearer that he does not want me in any conceivable way, and we’re not in the danger zone yet. There is no “safe” in our situation, but I am at least protected from that.

“I can feel you staring,” he says to the empty air.

Startled, I almost bite down on my own tongue. I turn back around and curl my knees to my chest. I don’t want to ask. Asking would be the worst thing in the world. Asking would be admitting to fear, and naming fear gives it power.

But I am spared when Cardan says, unprompted, “I’m not going to try anything, Jesus.” The _Don’t you know that_? hangs unspoken in the air between us, because I should know it, seeing as he’s been telling me I stink for years. That while his kind ostensibly was made to dominate mine, my chemicals do not agree with his, and so he would never stoop to that level.

I get it. And sure, it stings to be unwanted, but not so much now, because I can sleep through the night with Cardan at my back and really, truly not worry about being prey. “Right,” I say. “Good. Because you’re the last person in the world I’d want that from, anyway.”

“Yes, you’ve made that clear.”

Never mind that he made it clear first. I burrow into my pillow as best I can. “Well, enjoy your uninterrupted sleep.”

I expect a smart remark from him, but there’s nothing but a sigh. Then, because I am listening carefully, I hear his breathing grow long and even, and I realize he actually has fallen asleep. He isn’t too nervous, too tense to be kept awake. I am both of those things, but also exhausted, so I guess I can understand that eventually, exhaustion has its way.

It’s weird that twenty-four hours ago he was one of the people I hated most in the world, someone who stood in for the system that had scorned me my whole life. He still might be, outside these walls. But for now he’s just a boy, sleeping at my back.

I close my eyes, and sleep too.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If I die out here alone, for nothing, I will feel so incredibly stupid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! You may notice we have some new character tags! Very exciting. Please also note the "Past Attempted Rape/Non-Con" tag — this is briefly mentioned at the end of this chapter, but will be discussed more heavily in chapters six and seven. There will never be a direct flashback to this event, but Jude and Cardan talk about it. (And in case it's a concern, Cardan was not involved.)
> 
> That's all from me! Enjoy the escape (attempt).

Despite the damp cool of the basement, I am warm when I finally blink my eyes open to the dim morning light. Cardan has curled up at my back.

Alpha blood tends to run hot, they say. It plays into the general myth that we are opposites in every way: alphas hot, omegas cold; alphas strong, omegas weak; alphas dominant, omegas submissive, and so on. Scientifically the hot-cold theory has a little backing, though we’re talking an average temperature difference of 0.2 to 0.5 degrees max. But with Cardan so close to me, practically radiating heat, I am almost inclined to believe it.

We’re not touching too much. He has sort of nestled his face into the juncture of my neck and shoulder, and if I hadn’t slept in my sweatshirt I could probably feel his eyelashes tickle my skin. His hand found the curve of my waist in the night. But that’s it. The rest of him is a few inches away, like even in sleep he finds it difficult to overcome his revulsion to me.

It’s almost comfortable, if I forget who I am and who he is. Not even _what_ I am and _what_ he is, because Madoc’s position means that if any handsome, eligible alpha bachelors deigned to outright marry an omega, as he had once married our mother, Taryn and I would be the best of the bunch—best-connected, best-educated, best-groomed. No, it’s that he is Cardan and I am Jude, and I have hated him ever since my body put itself at war with my brain, and he has hated me too, just because I was afforded some small amount of privilege without being born into it.

And still, I stay there for a minute, soaking up his warmth. Because I didn’t think I’d have this anytime soon. I didn’t think I’d get to wake up next to a boy cuddling me, not after what happened with Valerian and _definitely_ not after what happened with Locke. And even though these are the worst circumstances, and this is the worst boy, there’s something perversely nice about it.

Or maybe I just like things that are bad for me.

I was thinking of seeing if girls were better when I got to college, but they don’t really explain how alpha-omega girl sex works in school and I am not about to ask Vivi. And now I don’t know if I’ll even make it to college, so maybe it’s not so bad if I steal a moment of peace.

But then the stink of mildew cuts through Cardan’s rich sweet-musky- _boy_ scent and I am forcibly reminded of where we are and why, especially now of all times, I can’t afford to be soft. So I jam my elbow back into his side, and if I do it with maybe a little less force than I normally would, well, it’s not like he knows that.

Cardan awakens with a start. “Ow!” he says, rolling over onto his back and pressing a hand to his side. “What the hell!”

“You’re fine.” I sit up, take down my now grody ponytail, run my fingers through it and begin to put it up again, watching him out of the corner of my eye. “Today’s the day.”

Cardan scowls at me, rubbing his side.

“Do or die day,” I clarify, looping my elastic around another time. “In case you forgot.”

“I remember,” he huffs. “That mattress is terrible.”

“Well, maybe tonight you’ll get to sleep in your own bed. Or maybe we’ll be dead. _Or_ we’ll be locked in this room again and you can sleep on the floor.”

“Such tempting options. However will I choose?”

I roll my shoulders, trying to work the kinks out of my muscles. “My guess is we’re going to be held up with the police for questioning for a long time. You might not have to. Maybe the choice will be made for you.”

“As always, Duarte, I do so admire your rosy outlook.” Cardan finger-combs his hair and sits up all the way, blinking at me. “I’m still worried about the third guy.”

I don’t tell him that I’d been thinking the same thing. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I say quietly. “We have two other bridges to cross first.”

Only a minute or so after I say it, there’s that knock on the door. I glance at Cardan, who needs to play the role of alpha today, and wait for him to speak, even though it sucks to defer to him. He takes his time about it, too, stretching his long legs, running his fingers through his hair once more, like he has all the time in the world, like the person on the other end of the door should be so lucky as to strangle him.

Just as _I’m_ about to strangle him, he calls, “Yes?”

The door opens. The scarred man and his gun are there, along with, absurdly, a little paper Starbucks bag in his other hand. An upgrade. He looks at me and Cardan—we’re now both sitting on the mattress, even though we are a few feet apart—but if he has any comments he keeps them to himself. He shakes the bag like he’s trying to call in a wayward dog. “Breakfast.”

“Thanks,” I say, because it is my place to be deferential.

“No coffee?” Cardan asks.

I whip my head around to glare at him. The man grunts, “Didn’t know how you took it.” Disconcertingly, I can’t tell if he has a sense of humor or if he’s serious.

Airily, Cardan says, “Fine. Put it down wherever.”

The scarred man raises both his eyebrows, but he half-sets, half-drops the bag on the floor and backtracks through the door, closing it and leaving us alone. Cardan goes over to retrieve it and peers inside. “Okay, looks like sausage, egg, and cheddar and… turkey bacon?”

I hold out my hand. “Give me the turkey bacon.”

“Oh, thank god,” Cardan says, and this time he doesn’t take a bite out of it before he hands it to me.

“Not a fan of turkey bacon?”

He scowls. “It’s all _healthy_. Plus, it’s not like turkeys actually have a belly to cut bacon from. You have to grind it up and make it yourself.”

I snort, but am happy for his judgment if it means my breakfast escapes unscathed. It doesn’t surprise me that Cardan couldn’t care less about eating healthily. From what I know, he has a mostly liquid diet, and the liquid is mainly alcohol. Not that it matters much. He probably won’t be able to keep getting away with it after a few more years, but right now his body takes pretty much everything he consumes and uses it to build him more muscle.

I think of how hard I have to strength train for a fraction of what Cardan gains just by existing, and how some of the training shows, especially in my arms and back, but the rest is buried under a cozy layer of body fat, and I kind of want to strangle him again. Just one of the many downsides of being an omega.

Since I don’t have any fun facts about turkey bacon to contribute, we eat breakfast without speaking. We had agreed that it was important to get our strength up for whatever lies ahead, but I find it hard to chew and swallow, even though the sandwich is lukewarm. I end up offering the last half to Cardan, who takes it despite his complaints.

Then, once enough time has passed, he gives me a look, and I nod and stand, shaking my legs out. Instead of staying in my usual corner, I stand next to the door, tense, waiting. With one last glance at me, Cardan strides over and knocks.

We have a system with our captors now. They know that the knocking means we want out for one reason or another. They either call through the door to find out why or just open it right away. This time, the door simply opens. Cardan stays where he is and does not move to the back of the room.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s that time again.”

It’s the woman’s voice I hear, and I am privately thankful. “Okay, back up.”

“But I was hoping I could go first.”

“Back up.”

Cardan takes one step back. It’s now that she realizes that I’m not in my corner. _Just a little further_ , I think. And she gives me the half-step I need.

“What’d you do with your friend?” she asks.

To answer that question, I grab her by her shirt and drag her into the cell.

Surprise is a legitimate advantage, but a fleeting one. Since she’s armed and I’m not, I need to move fast. I don’t have to think much about it. I jam my knee into her stomach; all of the air leaves her lungs in a startled gasp, and her grip loosens on the gun. I pry it from her hand with one of mine and use the other, still fisted into her shirt, to pull her further into the room—and let go.

It only takes a few seconds. I dart out. Cardan has already gone ahead, as I told him to, and I pull the door to behind me, quickly twisting the lock on the knob. That was phase one.

“Um, Jude,” says Cardan.

I turn, raising my stolen pistol in front of me before I do anything else, finger resting dangerously near the trigger. The scarred man stands on the other side of the table, his gun also raised. But instead of aiming it at Cardan, as we thought he would, he is pointing that barrel at me.

“This is a surprise,” he says.

Behind me, the doorknob rattles as the woman realizes I’ve locked her in.

“Let her out,” the man tells us, voice steady and slow.

“Or what?” I ask. Somehow, my voice doesn’t shake. “We’re both armed. Let us go and I won’t shoot you.”

“Do you even know how to use that thing?” he asks.

“What do you think?”

He cocks his head to look me over, evaluate my posture, my steady grip. “Huh,” he says, and then he moves to point his gun at Cardan instead. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Cardan’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. “I’ll only ask nicely one more time.”

I snort. “Sure. Do me the favor.”

The scarred man raises an eyebrow. Cardan whispers, “Jude?” like he isn’t sure whether or not I am playing a game. I am not sure either. I am intoxicated by the adrenaline pulsing through me.

“We’re not friends,” I clarify. “Shoot him if you want.”

Cardan gives me a panicked look.

“Of course, if you’ve promised to give him back alive, that’s going to cause some trouble.” My palm is sweaty. I shift my grip on the gun. The knob rattles again at my back, and I hear a soft curse, a hand slamming on the door. “It’s your call.”

The man’s lip curls into a kind of terrible smile. “All right, girl,” he says. “You go free. He stays. Leave the gun on the top step.”

I blink. “Really?”

“Final offer.”

I should go right away. Instead, I glance at Cardan, who has gone pale. But he looks at me again, and then, defying all my understanding of him, he whispers, “Go, Jude.”

So I do. Slowly, my entire body quivering with tension, I walk backwards up the stairs, keeping my pistol trained on the scarred man until the last possible moment. I try the knob at the top, and find it unlocked. It seems too easy, but with one last, stomach-churning glimpse of Cardan’s white face, I flee. But I don’t do everything. I do not give up the gun.

The house I step into has obviously long been abandoned—it was probably never even finished. Some of the walls have gaping holes in the plaster, the support beams visible; some were never plastered at all. There is no furniture to speak of. I don’t linger to take it in. I start running, through a hallway, in the direction of what might be the front door. When I find it, I tumble out into bright morning sunlight, and I keep going.

Immediately I know I am well and truly in the middle of nowhere. All around me is a field of overgrown grass. If there is a road, I cannot see or hear it. Still, I have to assume there was once a driveway that led somewhere, so I take off as fast as I can toward a distant line of trees. I do not wonder about Cardan. I do not wonder about anything.

For a minute it is just me, my feet flattening the dew-damp grass, my lungs straining with every breath. I am alone in a way that I haven’t been in days. Then there is a crack from behind me, and then I feel something rush past my face, just missing me. Startled, I drop the stolen pistol, which lands harmlessly in the grass and thankfully does not fire. I don’t stop running for it. Stopping is the last thing I should do, not when I am so close.

Still, my stomach drops. Without slowing too much, I glance over my shoulder back at the house. The second floor is half-intact, and I can kind of see through the wall—there might be a dark shape perched there. A man. The third man.

He’s a sniper.

I swear under my breath, and my panicked heart skips a beat. They chose this place on purpose. There’s no cover out here, giving them a clear view of whoever might be coming or going. Giving them time to move us in case the cavalry arrived. My only choices are to keep running until I am out of range, or stop, and go back. And I am not doing that.

If I die out here alone, for nothing, I will feel so incredibly stupid.

There’s another crack, now unmistakably the sound of a rifle being fired, and this time I feel when it hits—really more of a graze, but it still skims through my flesh about midway up my calf, leaving a tear in its wake. The strange thing is that, at first, being shot doesn’t hurt at all. It doesn’t feel like much of anything. It shouldn’t be enough to make me miss my step. I falter anyway, and when I bring my foot down I land on it wrong and roll my ankle. I drop with a cry into the grass, tears stinging the corner of my eyes.

But even then I keep going, crawling on my hands and knees through the long summer grass, blinking back my tears because I refuse to let myself cry. I don’t look at my ankle or my wound. It is only when I hear the grass crunching underfoot behind me, and a shadow falls over me, that I finally, finally stop moving forward.

I don’t stop fighting, though. The man—Cardan had described him as tall, and he was right—picks me up with some effort and, without a word, throws me over his shoulder like a sack of garbage. After adjusting me a little so my weight is more evenly distributed, he turns to carry me back to the house. All the time I am squirming, trying to kick, pounding at his back with my fists, screaming with the faint hope that someone might hear me. It isn’t enough to get the sniper to loosen his grip on my waist, but I do feel him wince in pain a couple of times, giving me some small, bitter satisfaction.

All I think is, _I shouldn’t have dropped the gun_.

Despair begins to set in as we reenter the unfinished house, as the sniper shoulders his way through the door to the basement and carries me down the stairs. Cardan is seated in a chair, rumpled but seemingly unharmed, his hands behind his back. Apparently, someone has bothered to tie him up or handcuff him this time. He sits forward when he sees me carried in. “Jude?”

“Are you _sure_ he’s the alpha?” the sniper asks his companions. “He seems to have gone easy on you.” He deposits me into another chair, and the woman is there immediately to cuff my hands, threading the handcuff chain through the chair back so I am well and truly stuck. I see that some of my blood has soaked into the sniper’s black shirt and think, _Good_. My leg is starting to hurt now, in throbs, like a bad burn.

“You _shot_ her?” Cardan asks, straining against his bonds.

“I’m fine,” I say, avoiding his gaze. I cannot believe he would do something as stupid as give himself up so I could go free. I look at my wounded calf, streaked red. There is an angry-looking tear there, but it could have been much worse. He didn’t hit bone. “It’s a graze.”

“Because he’s good at his job,” says the scarred man.

The sniper shakes his head and disappears into the room beyond the bathroom. He returns with a first aid kit and begins to stoop down next to me so he can clean my calf, but I raise my foot, threatening to kick him again.

“That’s enough,” the scarred man says. “Believe it or not, we _don’t_ want to hurt you kids.”

“Not,” I mutter under my breath.

“Hurting you wasn’t part of the remit unless you misbehaved,” says the sniper. “Is that more believable?”

I scowl and hold out my leg so that he can clean the wound. Cardan’s eyes narrow. “We can’t just trust you,” he says, as a stinging antiseptic pad is applied to the torn skin and I flinch. “We don’t even know who you are. Give us something. Names. Something to call you.”

The scarred man and the woman look at each other. The woman says, “You can call me the Bomb. This is the Roach. That—” She points to the sniper. “Is the Ghost. You can figure out why for yourself.”

“You call yourself the _Roach_?” Cardan asks. “Wow. I mean, love yourself a little.”

To my surprise, the man grins. “Not my choice, but we don’t get to choose. How’s her leg?”

“The twisted ankle is going to give her the most trouble,” the Ghost replies. He presses a clean cotton pad to the wound and binds it in gauze. Then he starts on wrapping my ankle. He’s efficient; he’s done this before. “Although I’m guessing we don’t want her mobile anyway.”

“I wouldn’t mind if she taught me a couple of moves,” the Bomb says, rubbing her stomach. I wonder if I bruised her. “What was that, karate?”

“Krav maga,” I admit, glaring at the Ghost as he props my foot up on the nearest empty chair. Ignoring me, he stands and leaves to wash his hands. “I’ve been training since I was nine.”

The Roach lets out a low whistle. “Someone didn’t want you getting jumped.”

I turn my glare on him. “For all the good it did me.”

For reasons I don’t understand, the Roach grins and holds up his hands. “This? This is just a paperwork dispute. Once everything’s signed and sealed, we’ll turn you loose.”

“Lot of hassle for some paperwork,” Cardan remarks. “You could have just let Jude go if it isn’t that big of a deal.”

“I’m starting to see it,” the Bomb says to the Ghost. “Although, yeah, I could have sworn the girl was the alpha too for a second there.”

And if that isn’t absurd enough, Cardan leans toward me across the table and asks, “Did they teach you how to slip handcuffs in krav maga school?”

“Do you want to dislocate your thumbs?” the Ghost asks abruptly, reemerging from the bathroom.

I give Cardan a shrug and a nod—that is how to do it—and he shudders.

“Look, we know just about everything there is to know about this guy,” says the Roach, pulling out the last empty chair and sitting across from me. “But now I’m curious about you.”

I blink. “There’s not much to say.”

“He has quite a file on him,” says the Bomb, jerking her head to indicate Cardan, who pulls an innocent face. “But you were nowhere in it. We thought you were a bystander, a fling, or maybe his new girlfriend—”

“His _what_?” I squawk.

“But you’re way more interesting than that,” the Roach concludes. “Cardan told us this whole little escape plan was yours.”

The Ghost, for his part, leans against the wall, folds his arms over his chest, and says nothing. I decide I would like him best except for the part where he shot me.

“Why don’t you just let _Cardan_ tell my life story, then?” I snap, angry at everything and everyone.

“Gladly,” Cardan says, looking a little too gleeful. “Jude Duarte was born with a chip on her shoulder. She’s glaring about ninety percent of the time and never lets her guard down, ever. As far as I know, she’s only gotten drunk once. She and her sister were the first omegas to graduate from our school, and Jude staged a coup by being named valedictorian, too, as if being first at just one thing wasn’t good enough. Our last semester, she gave a kid a black eye and got _him_ expelled.”

“Why?” The Bomb asks. “What did he do?”

Cardan lapses into an embarrassed silence that I don’t really understand. Valerian had been his friend, once. Maybe still is. I say casually, “He tried to do what alphas always do,” like I don’t still feel the awful weight on top of me, the cheekbone cracking under my knuckles. “So I did what I had to.”

“They expel kids for that now?” asks the Roach. “Huh. Good on them.”

“Jude’s dad made a persuasive case,” Cardan says.

They exchange bemused glances. The Ghost asks, “Who’s her dad?”

Cardan and I look at each other across the table. They really don’t know.

“My adoptive father,” I clarify, because it matters. “He’s a lawyer. Uh, his last name’s Madoc?”

“Oh,” says the Roach. “Shit.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So what does it say that they have no fear of extorting one of your brothers, but they’re reconsidering everything now that they know who my dad is?” I ask.
> 
> “I’d rather fistfight Dain than your dad,” Cardan says, with a snort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I mentioned last chapter, there is further discussion of a past attempted rape in this one. The incident itself is not depicted.

The thing about the Valerian incident is that it was supposed to be the third-worst thing that had ever happened to me.

The first worst thing is, obviously, my parents dying, because that is always the first thing. It would have been bad enough if I wasn’t there for it but I was—buckled in the backseat with my sisters, walking away with only scratches, all of my broken parts invisible.

The second worst thing is finding out that Locke was playing Taryn and me off each other. You might think, well, that’s not as bad as the Valerian incident, except that Taryn knew what he was doing the whole time and continued to date him after. Suffice it to say, that sucked, and it continues to suck every day to look at my sister and remember she chose a boy over me. And I kissed Locke, too. He isn’t worth it.

Against those two things, Valerian seems like an obvious third-worst, which I’m sure would piss him off to no end if he knew. Except he haunted me in a way that the Locke thing didn’t, and in a way the accident that had killed my parents had stopped doing years ago. When we were still young, Taryn and I would clutch each other’s hands, white-knuckled, whenever we went driving in the rain, which thankfully wasn’t often. We would flinch at police sirens, watch ambulances drive by with dread. At least that faded when our other scars did not.

It doesn’t seem right that, even after Valerian was expelled, he lingered. But so what? So what if I grew clammy when I had to press through a clot of bodies in the middle of a crowded hallway? So what if I found myself looking out for a flash of blond hair disappearing around corners ahead of me? So what if I checked classrooms to make sure he wasn’t there, although of course he wasn’t, because that’s what _being expelled_ means? That’s nobody’s business but mine. I was already vigilant all of the time, and even though extra vigilance just made for an exhausting final semester, I was fine. I was used to it.

It was so stupid. Because something had happened, but nothing had _really_ happened. Valerian had gone and I was here. I _won_.

Didn’t I?

“Jude,” Cardan says from somewhere very far away, whispering for some reason. Then a little louder, “ _Jude_.” And then, finally, “Duarte?”

I pick my head up. “What?” I snap.

Cardan jerks his head at the door, but doesn’t say anything. I sit forward. There are raised voices coming through from the other side, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. My own thoughts were loud enough that I had missed them.

So stupid.

“What are they talking about?” I ask Cardan, who has at least been listening longer.

He shakes his head. “Dunno. My best guess is your dad has them scared shitless.”

That’s my best guess, too. I look down and realize that my hands have been curled into fists this whole time. I force them open, looking at the little red crescents my nails imprinted on the meat of my palms. So Cardan doesn’t see them, I lean over my crossed legs, resting my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands.

“So what does it say that they have no fear of extorting one of your brothers, but they’re reconsidering everything now that they know who my dad is?” I ask.

“I’d rather fistfight Dain than your dad,” Cardan says, with a snort.

“Not Balekin?”

Cardan shrugs one shoulder. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure this is Dain’s work now.”

“Why?”

“Because Balekin would have me killed outright.” I am surprised by how matter-of-factly he says it. “No theatrics, either. Probably make it look like an OD or something, then try to assert his claim over my share of the corporation. He was my guardian for years, probably thinks that gives him the right. And Dain would know that.”

I raise my eyebrows. Unlike Dain, I didn’t know that.

Cardan drums his fingers on his knee. “But Balekin doesn’t think he has to kill me, yet. I assume he thinks that because he raised me, when I do have the power to vote on company matters, I’ll do so in his interest. Or maybe he believes I can be persuaded to give my share up for the right price. That’s what happened with Rhyia.”

Rhyia’s the only one of Cardan’s siblings I know well. As Vivi’s best friend, they were always in and out of each other’s houses growing up. She’s laid back, poly, and has always been nice to me. I’ve met Cardan’s brothers a few times, too, since Madoc works with them, but they’re so much older than us that they’re basically in another world. The world of adults, which I will probably not get to join until college. “What did Rhyia do?”

“Rhyia has zero interest in the company. I mean, none. Dain bought her out.”

“And you _do_ have interest in the family business?”

“Not so much.” Cardan gives me a tight smile. “But I would never, ever sell to Dain, and he knows that. My brothers have been vying for control of the company for years. I think this is Dain’s Hail Mary. He gets my share, he’s basically got half the family votes locked in.”

“Well, no wonder negotiations are taking so long. Balekin can’t like that.” I glance uneasily at the door. “Would you? Sell him your stake?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll keep it just to be difficult.”

“Can’t really picture you in a board meeting,” I say, turning back to him. “In a suit and tie. Sitting through PowerPoint presentations on the stock market or… media buys in Australia or whatever.”

Cardan shudders. “No, thanks. I do look very dashing in a suit and tie, but I can leave the rest of it.”

I don’t exactly want to think about Cardan in a suit and tie. I don’t want to think about his brothers squabbling over the family fortune. I don’t want to think about our abductors arguing because of my dad. And the thing I don’t want to think about most keeps winding its way around my insides, curdling my stomach.

My parents. Then, Locke and Taryn. Then, Valerian.

I have to ask, or it’ll eat at me like acid.

“Why did you say that?” I whisper.

Cardan, who had apparently been lost in his own thoughts, looks back at me. “Say what?”

I sit up straight. I don’t want to slouch for this. I don’t want to be without armor. “What you said about me. About what happened with Valerian.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He grimaces. “I just didn’t really think it through.”

Any normal person—or maybe just any non-alpha person—might have apologized at the end of that statement, but because it’s Cardan I’m not holding my breath. Instead I look right at him and ask, “Why would you even bring it up?”

“Because…” Cardan sounds confused. “Because I was listing the things about you that I think are kind of badass and that’s one of them?”

Disbelief strikes me like a lightning bolt. “ _What_?”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s not like the circumstances were great—”

“I had to physically fight off one of your erstwhile best friends so he wouldn’t rape me,” I say, very slowly, very clearly, “and you brought it up because you thought that was, what, _cool_? You thought that was _cool of me_?”

Going by the way the color drains from Cardan’s face, the way he swallows, it seems like he is beginning to realize how monumentally he has fucked up. “Well,” he says, “first of all, erstwhile, great SAT word—”

“Cardan,” I bark.

He shuts up. He did say he tended to joke when he was nervous, but I am not in the mood for jokes. I am struggling to keep control of my breath, my little flame, to keep from breathing fire and burning him to a crisp. Sure, maybe he was trying to make me sound scary so our kidnappers would be impressed, or something. But he could have left that out. Everyone moved past it. I moved past it. I am going to college and I will never have to think of it again, except that now I am, because he brought it up.

But before I can figure out how to chew him out for it, Cardan decides to keep talking again. “Jude, you’re, what, five-four?”

“Five,” I correct, out of habit.

“Okay. Valerian’s six-two. He has to weigh nearly twice what you do and he’s an alpha. That’s a fight you were built to lose and you didn’t.” I open my mouth, but he continues, “Yeah, I was impressed, okay? I would have been impressed with you just for trying in the face of, frankly, fucking terrible odds. And I guess I was also impressed with you for fighting because… I don’t.”

I stare at him. “You fight,” I say. “You fight people all the time. What about the time you punched that sophomore because he looked at you funny? What about when you put Eliza’s little brother in a locker and left him for half a day? We all knew that was you and your friends, even though he wouldn’t tell on you.”

“Okay—”

“What about the time we were on that field trip in eleventh grade and you guys pushed me and Taryn into the fountain in Madison Square Park because you thought I needed to wash off my stench?”

“That was like a year and a half ago,” he says, disdainfully, like I’m the one being gauche by rehashing it.

“It was winter,” I say, crossing my arms. “It was cold.”

Cardan closes his eyes and holds up one hand. “Fine, fine. I have… lashed out. I’m not proud of it. But that’s different from what you did. All those times you mentioned, I knew I would win.”

“It must be nice,” I snap. “Some of us don’t have that luxury. Some of us have our fights picked out for us the day we’re born, and we learn really early that there are no easy victories.”

“I do know what it’s like to lose, Duarte,” he insists. “Don’t talk about me like you know me. I know what it’s like to—feel small.”

I really doubt that, but I say, “Sure. Maybe you do. Maybe there’s a bigger, badder alpha somewhere up the food chain angling to turn you into dinner. But you know what? You’re still at the top and I am way the hell down, as far as society’s concerned. So I’m _sorry_ I’m not so impressed with you for admiring me because I stood up for myself. Do you know why I had to do that?”

Cardan is silent for what feels like a full minute, and then says, “Because Valerian—”

“No, not _because Valerian_.” It feels so freeing to talk to him like this, knowing that he cannot do anything about it. It feels like yelling at him on the beach. I don’t know where I am going or if I will ever stop. “Why do you think he felt like he could do that? Why do you think he felt like he could do it at school— _of all places_ —and get away with it? Because you made it okay to make me a target the day you first pushed me down in gym. Because every time you and your friends and the other shitty alphas sneered at us in the hall or tripped us or did worse, nobody did anything about it. Of course Valerian felt empowered to fuck with me, because I’m not worth anything, and you, personally, have made that exceptionally clear.”

There’s a prolonged stretch of quiet where all I hear is ringing in my ears. When Cardan speaks, his voice is low. “I don’t think you’re being fair.”

I roll my eyes. “Yeah, well, life isn’t fair. Obviously. Or did you not listen to any of what I just said? If life was fair, my parents would be alive. If life was fair, we would have never fucking met.”

Silence falls like an anvil pushed over the side of a cliff in an old cartoon, and I’m not sure whether I’m the roadrunner or the coyote. I feel the weight of it crushing my chest. I can’t look at Cardan’s face.

Luckily, we are not left alone long. The door is opened without a knock by the Roach, the Ghost standing close behind him. No guns this time, just the undeniable certainty that I am wounded and we are outnumbered.

“You guys want to wash up?” the Roach asks. “Stretch your legs. We’ve got food out here.”

I look at Cardan without thinking, then quickly look away. “Sure,” I say. “Can I use the shower?”

“If you’re quick about it.”

I nod and ease myself toward the edge of the mattress, bracing myself against the wall to stand. A searing pain shoots through my injured leg, both from the sprain and the now-aching gunshot wound, and I grimace. I see Cardan sit forward as if to help me, but something in my face makes him keep his distance.

“I can help,” the Ghost says softly, moving into the room.

“I don’t think so,” Cardan says. “You _shot her_.”

“Let him help,” I interject, just to piss Cardan off. “He can make it up to me.”

The Ghost crosses the room and wraps an arm under my shoulders so I can lean on him. I begin to make my way out of the room, favoring my left leg. The Roach looks past me, at Cardan, and says, “Come on, kid.”

“Why am I ‘kid?’” Cardan asks as he stands, clearly irritated. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him jerk his thumb at the Ghost. “How old is this guy?”

“Older than you.”

“Not much,” Cardan snorts.

“I have a young face,” says the Ghost. That may be true. He looks somewhere in his twenties, although where is anyone’s guess. It’s a handsome face, at least. Good bone structure. And I am pretty sure his stick-straight spine marks him as ex-military, even though his sandy hair is long enough to curl a little. I am disturbed that, even up close like this, I can’t scent him at all. Those must be some strong maskers.

Cardan grumbles something under his breath and follows us out of the room, sliding into one of the folding chairs. The Ghost helps me into the bathroom, but closes the door behind me so I can wash off in private. There’s no shampoo, so I reconfigure my abused elastic and make my hair sit in a bun on top of my head while I use the soap to wash off. On the whole I am not much _better_ , but I do feel more grounded, a little less grimy. I towel off, put my two-day-old clothes back on, and wash my mouth out with water before limping out of the bathroom.

The Ghost helps me into another folding chair and props my injured leg up on the empty sliver of Cardan’s chair. Cardan nurses a can of Coke, but as soon as I am settled he sprints to the bathroom to have his turn. The Bomb, seated to my right, wordlessly offers me a choice between a Slim Jim and a protein bar. I pick the protein bar and tear open the wrapper, nibbling at it as the Ghost checks my bandages. I had tried to keep them out of the water, but wasn’t completely successful, and he ends up re-wrapping the one around the graze. I do not look down and try to make myself eat.

It’s one of the good protein bars, at least. Peanut butter-flavored and doesn’t totally taste like chemicals. I make a mental note to check out the brand when I get back home.

If.

Cardan comes out of the bathroom with a hand towel draped around his neck, catching the drips from his wet hair. “Rolling out the red carpet, are we?” he asks. “Snacks, bespoke medical care…”

The Ghost, finishing with my bandages, stands and skulks to the wall. He seems to prefer standing to sitting. The Roach slides into the empty chair across from mine. “Finish your Coke,” he says to Cardan. “We’ll talk.”

Cardan scowls, but he crosses to the chair and sits down. He bumps my foot a little by accident, but doesn’t look at me. “It’s funny how when it was just me you guys were concerned with we were stuck in the room for twenty-three hours with no snacks, that’s all.”

I don’t want to admit it, but he has a point. “It is funny,” I say, looking at the Roach, who I’m gathering is the nominal leader of the group. “What is it about my dad that has you guys so spooked?”

“Do you know what Madoc _does_?” the Bomb asks. Her voice is curious and holds no malice, no expectation that I should know already. It’s concerning.

“He’s a lawyer. A good one.”

“That’s not the half of it,” the Roach says. “He’s a fixer.”

Cardan snickers. “What, like on _Scandal_?”

“Oh, kid.” The Roach shakes his head. “You wouldn’t joke if you knew the shit he’s cleaned up for your brothers. Or your father, for that matter.”

“I know a little,” Cardan replies, surprising me. “My dad had a few lawsuits mysteriously go away. ‘Settled.’ And everyone knew what he was.”

“What was he?” I asked, my stomach sinking.

“He was an alpha,” Cardan says, but he talks to the Roach, not to me. “The old school kind. It’s how he ended up with six kids. My mom—my real mom, who was, by the way, an omega, although none of us are supposed to talk about it—sure got a payout in order to go away. I wonder if Madoc had anything to do with that.”

I put my protein bar on the table, feeling ill. “No,” I say. “No, Madoc wouldn’t do that. He lives by a code. I mean, he was married to an omega. One of the partners at his practice—”

“Sure, there are jobs he won’t take,” says the Ghost, from the far wall. His arms are folded across his chest. “I know of at least one. And this sort of thing obviously isn’t his style. But he knows how the world works.”

I shake my head.

“You said you got krav maga training,” he continues, in a striking non-sequitur. “What else?”

“I—there was—” But I falter. Boxing, practicing on the well-used punching bag in our basement. Weekends spent at the shooting range, not just learning how to aim and pull a trigger, but how to clean a gun, how to take it apart and put it back together. The weeks in the summer that would always be reserved for a sort of improvised boot camp upstate. The Swiss army knives, engraved with our names, so we’d never be caught unarmed.

“He knows how the world works,” the Ghost repeats. “Enough to protect you from it.”

“And if it’s any consolation, my mom got a good enough payout to fuck off somewhere warm,” Cardan says, finally looking at me. “If that was Madoc’s work, he did her a favor. It’s not like she wanted to stick around, anyway.”

I don’t know whether I want to tear off the heads of everyone in this room or disappear. I can do neither of those things. I steady my voice and say, “So you guys don’t want to get cleaned up, is that it?”

“I know of your dad. Know some of his associates.” The Roach gives me a tight smile that seems to strain some of his scars. “Personally, I’d rather remain off their radar. Our employer wasn’t forthcoming about who you were, Jude Duarte, even though they knew, and none of us is thrilled about that. The Ghost is sorry for shooting you, by the way.”

The Ghost frowns. “I expected her to stop when she heard the warning shot.”

Unfortunately for him, I kept running. I am always running, and I never know when to stop. But I just shrug.

“We can’t let you go just yet,” says the Bomb. “But we’ll try to keep you more comfortable. Honestly, we thought this would be a twenty-four hour babysitting job, just watching him. It was supposed to be.”

“You could have left me on the beach,” I say angrily.

The Bomb and the Roach look at each other. “We thought you might help ensure Cardan’s good behavior,” the Roach says. “A… miscalculation.”

“One of the more astounding fuck-ups of our career,” the Bomb adds. She grins at me. “Turns out you’re an instigator.”

“Frankly, we now need the money from this job to disappear,” says the Roach. “But again, we’re not going to hurt you unless you misbehave. You have our word on that.”

“For what it’s worth,” Cardan mutters.

“And with that ankle, you’re not going to be mobile for a while anyway.” The Roach nods at my leg. “We’ll keep it wrapped. Make sure you’re both comfortable. The storm should blow over soon and then it’s back to your charmed life. College, yachts, whatever. Sound good?”

Even though I don’t want to, I glance at Cardan. He catches my eye, the corners of his lips turned down. We can’t say what we’re thinking: the storm’s barely begun. Because if I wake up the next morning in that cell with him, we’re going to have bigger problems than a sprained ankle. And we still don’t know which of our captors might also be alphas, so it isn’t safe to tell them a goddamn thing.

“Sounds great,” I lie. Cardan gives a tight nod.

We’re screwed.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That’s what I think I fear most. Not the symptoms, but being out of control. My brain taking a backseat and letting my body drive.

“Seriously?” Cardan asks, holding up the local newspaper the Roach handed him. “We’re too cheap for the _New York Times_?”

“They were out,” the Roach grunts.

“This house is a nightmare,” Cardan says under his breath.

We’ve been brought out of our cell again to pose for a proof of life photo. Seated, because I can’t stand for long. Cardan is given the newspaper to prove the photo is current, although the Bomb is holding an old-fashioned Polaroid camera and I am not sure anyone will be able to make out the details. I have been asked to do nothing but sit still.

“Do you want us to smile?” Cardan asks, once the Bomb has the camera ready.

“If you want,” says the Bomb. “Go ahead.”

Cardan does. I glare daggers.

“Well, he’ll know it’s her,” the Bomb remarks. With a gloved, almost dainty hand, she pulls the Polaroid out and sets it on top of the minifridge to develop.

“Why did you smile?” I hiss.

Cardan shrugs. “Just because we’re hostages doesn’t mean we have to look like we’re having a bad time.”

“That’s exactly what it means.”

“Couple more,” says the Bomb, raising her camera again. “Bear with me.”

We do, as she snaps a couple more photos, presumably ones where I don’t look so much like I’m about to strangle Cardan. She takes the best ones and slides them into an envelope, which she seals shut with a little water on her gloved finger. No fingerprints, no saliva, no DNA. Just proof of life.

Cardan notices, too. “You’re pretty good at this crime thing,” he tells her. “Ever think about doing it for a living?”

“It’s really just a hobby for now,” she says dryly, handing the envelope to the Ghost, who heads up the stairs and out to deliver it who-knows-where.

“Looks like a full-blown side-gig to me,” Cardan returns.

The Bomb shrugs. “Well, this economy.”

I wonder if I should be alarmed or encouraged that our captors are beginning to genuinely like him.

It’s already late, after a long, mostly-silent stretch of afternoon in the cell, so we are fed and watered and allowed to relieve ourselves once more before we’re put away again. The Roach offers to help me walk, but I manage to make my way around the basement and eventually hobble to the mattress without assistance. It’s not dignified, but at least I maintain a scrap of my dignity.

Before the Roach is able to lock us in for the night, though, Cardan catches the door in his hand and leans forward. He’s whispering, but the room is small enough that I can hear him anyway. “Hey, um, so, can I have my drugs back?”

Around Cardan’s shoulders, I see the Roach’s face split into a terrible grin. “Nah,” he says. “But nice try.”

And then he closes the door and leaves us alone.

Cardan rubs a hand over his face and goes to sit in his corner. I am staring at him. “You wanted to get high? _Now_?”

“I had some O on me when they took us,” he says. “Good quality stuff. Pure. Synthetic, obviously.” He glances at me.

“Sure,” I say. It’s never really sat right with me that people have figured out how to distill some of the compounds in pheromones—O for omega, A for alpha—and that other, richer people now use them as party drugs, but, hey, at least it’s hard to overdose. And synthetic means the chemicals weren’t harvested from anybody, so, ethically sourced high. In theory.

I’ve never tried A, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Taryn has by now. Locke is not a good influence.

“Actually, I was thinking of trying to dull my receptors, in light of…” He waves a hand. “Well, tomorrow being what it is, you…”

“Oh,” I say quietly.

“Nic always said I’d ruin them if I indulged too much.” It’s dark, so I can’t see his facial expression very well, but I make out his silhouette slumping against the wall. “Thought I’d finally take that bet.”

It takes me a second to realize he means Nicasia, his ex-girlfriend. Still his friend, though. I think. It’s weirdly humanizing, the idea that he has a nickname for somebody he likes. It makes him more of a person. “You call her Nic?” I ask. “I’ve never heard anyone call her that before.”

“Well, no. You’re not allowed. It’s a special privilege.”

I snicker but don’t reply, looking down at my hands instead. Tomorrow morning will be three days since I took my last suppressant. Two days since I woke up in this cell, locked in with Cardan. I’m about guaranteed to go into heat, and I don’t know what will happen after that. Whether I’ll have enough presence of mind to care about what will happen. If I will even be myself.

That’s what I think I fear most. Not the symptoms. Not even that I might end up mating with Cardan, of all people. But being out of control. My brain taking a backseat and letting my body drive.

“Jude?” Cardan asks quietly.

I don’t want to talk about it. Not with him. Not now. So I shift to a more comfortable seat against my wall and say nothing.

But he surprises me by asking, “Did you mean what you said before? Do you really blame me for what happened with Valerian?”

“Yes.” But there’s a twinge in my chest as I remember the shock on his face, the way he avoided my eyes the rest of the day. I had struck my mark, but at what cost? As he said, it’s not like he was actually there. I press the heel of my palm into my eye. “No. Maybe. I don’t know, Cardan. You didn’t help.”

“Yeah, but like…” I hear him flick at some dust on the floor. “I didn’t know, you know? I didn’t know what he was going to do. If I had known, I would have stopped him.”

I blink in his direction. “I thought you did know,” I say abruptly, and I don’t quite realize how true that is until I say it aloud. That Cardan, who has historically masterminded so much misery, must be behind this, too.

“What?”

“After Locke…” I pick at one of the scratchy blankets. “I mean, Valerian was first, but then when it turned out Locke was trying to get with me _and_ Taryn, I thought it was some awful competition between the three of you. Who could get in my pants first, or make me most miserable, or…”

“No, no.” Cardan actually has the audacity to look shocked. “Jude, I know that I can be a miserable son of a bitch sometimes, but there are lines.”

“Are there? You never acted like it. You insulted me every chance you got. You pushed me into a _fountain_.”

He chuckles weakly. “That again?”

“It was cold,” I grumble, crossing my arms. “I was cold all day. And I had to lie to my dad.”

And I don’t add the part that hurt most—that he said he was sick of smelling me and I needed to wash off. I can’t control how I smell to him. In fact, I always resented him for smelling so good to me when we clearly weren’t a match. It’s a little easier to get over since he’s so terrible, but it sucks to know that my body picked someone out who could not be clearer about his lack of reciprocation. A defect in me. Something else I can’t control.

“Well, yeah, but there’s a huge difference between that and rape.” He falls quiet for a second, then says, “I’m glad you defended yourself. I am. And I do admire you for that. That’s all.”

“Then you’re crazy. I don’t think anyone else does, aside from Madoc.” I look down. “It’s not what omegas are supposed to do. Fight back. Fight at all.”

I hear Cardan flick another dustbunny. “You know what Balekin said about it?”

My shoulders tense. I know that word of the whole thing had spread through the school like wildfire, even though the disciplinary meeting we had with the principal was supposed to have been confidential, but there’s a difference between knowing and hearing that Cardan’s older brother, of all people, had an opinion. “What did he say?” I ask slowly, dreading the answer.

“He said, ‘I don’t know what Madoc was thinking, sending those girls to your school.’ Like it was just something that was bound to happen.” I feel a little nauseated, but Cardan continues, “That didn’t sit right with me. I mean, you’d been going to school with alphas for ten years. You had alpha teachers. I mean, we had classes together for six years, and I never thought to—”

“Yeah,” I say quietly. “You’ve been very clear about that.”

“No, but—ugh.” Cardan runs a hand through his hair, frustrated. “I think Valerian was wrong. And Balekin was wrong. And you were right. I’d just never thought about it like that before.”

I sigh. “What do you want, a cookie? For thinking I deserve basic human rights?”

In the darkness, I see him wince. “You don’t pull punches, do you?”

“Not anymore.” I lean forward and run my hands over my bandages. The Ghost had done a good job with them. “I did mean what I said about you making it worse. Maybe you didn’t know what Valerian was going to do. Maybe you didn’t egg him on. But you upheld that hierarchy, you know. Strongest alphas on top, omegas on the bottom. You benefited from it.”

“Well, it’s just the—”

“The way things are. I know.” I exhale. “It’s not how they have to be.”

Cardan is quiet for a while. “Valerian liked to hurt people,” he says at last. “Anyone. Animals, even. It was his main alpha trait, that aggression. ‘Couldn’t be helped,’ according to his, I think, third psychiatrist. I think we all thought if we could direct that, use it for our benefit, point him in a direction like—I don’t know, an arrow…”

“Sounds like you need better friends,” I say. Managing Valerian sounds like trying to leash a rabid dog, and I truly do not envy him that. Hoping the dog will only bite other people is selfish and awful, but also bound to fail.

“I haven’t spoken to him since what he did to you.” His voice is unexpectedly firm. Again, he surprises me. “Tried to do, I mean. I told Nic and Locke to cut him off, too. He’s basically dead to us.”

“Oh.” I squint at him, feeling—I don’t know what I’m feeling. “ _Really_?”

“Yeah.”

“But he was your friend.”

“Well…” Cardan taps his finger on the floor. “Maybe I don’t want a friend like that.”

I sit with that admission for a moment, trying to make it square with what I know of Cardan outside these walls. It’s almost like there are two of him: the awful one wreaking havoc outside, and the one in here, with me, who sounds almost on the verge of apologizing. Who uses his alpha charm for good on our kidnappers. Who _reads books_. Who almost seems to care.

“Your other friends are also kind of shitty,” I point out. “Didn’t Nicasia cheat on you? _With_ Locke?”

Cardan shrugs. “Nic’s not so bad. Locke cheated on her with you _and_ your sister, so I consider us pretty much even for that. Locke, though…” He sighs. “I wish he’d just admit he has a crush on me and get over it.”

I let out a shocked, choked laugh. “What?”

“What other explanation is there for him making out with pretty much anyone I’ve ever really liked?”

I had known about Nicasia, but it sounds like there are others I don’t know about. Still, must be nice, being Cardan, having that kind of confidence in someone being mean because they like you. “He’s a douchebag?” I suggest.

“Maybe,” Cardan says. “Too easy, though. I want complex, psychological drama, Duarte. I want homoerotic CW drama.”

“It sounds like you want Locke to put his tongue in your mouth.”

“I mean, for the experience, sure. Frankly, I’m a little offended he hasn’t tried.”

My cheeks hurt, and I realize I am smiling. How is he getting inside my guard so easily? Saying a few nice things about admiring my tenacity isn’t enough to negate years of schoolyard warfare. It feels good, though. Maybe even better because the person delivering the compliment is totally unexpected.

“ _Fine_ ,” I sigh.

“Fine what?”

“You’re clearly angling to get your spot on the mattress back. It’s working.” I lean over as far as I can and pat the empty half. “Come on. Probably the last night you can sleep here.”

“You sure?”

It’s funny how I can now tell he’s raising his eyebrow just from the way he asks the question. It’s not a soft, gentle ask—like he’s worried about spooking me—but a sardonic one. Almost a challenge. So even if he _is_ worried about spooking me, he’s spared my pride. I appreciate that.

This is the most I have actually ever spoken to Cardan Greenbriar. It turns out he’s kind of fun.

I shrug. “Sure. Either we’re going to be keeping our distance and you’ll have to take the floor tomorrow, or we’ll be too busy humping to sleep. Like bunnies. Might as well make the most of it while you can.”

Cardan kicks his shoes off, then sits down next to me on the mattress with a grunt. “I think it’s more like wolves,” he says, grinning. “Or dogs. On account of the—”

“Knot.” I visibly shudder. “I know. Gross.”

His grin widens. “Absolutely disgusting.”

I have to take a breath. This is a very specific heat/rut thing, the knot of it all, and most non-heat sex doesn’t trigger it. It is also one of the things I have looked forward to least about eventual sex-having, eventual partner-having. I had kind of hoped I’d get to practice without it. “But all kinds of sex acts sound gross when you break them down on a technical level,” I say, trying to reassure myself. “So maybe it’s not so bad.”

“Maybe.” Cardan props one of the pillows against the wall and settles down on his back, his arms crossed behind head. A model of comfort, of ease. I wonder how much he is faking. No one could be that cool in our situation.

I am quiet for a moment, looking up at the ceiling as though I can still count the criss-crossing pipes that run along it like country roads. “Does it bother you that you won’t ever have a mate? Not that you won’t mate, just that you probably can’t have a… like a _mate_ mate?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Cardan tilt his chin up toward me. “Does it bother you?”

“It’s different for me. You know that.” I don’t lie down next to him just yet, but I do look at him. His shirt’s hitched up a little above his jeans, exposing a line of his flat stomach, the ridge of a hip bone. “Everyone I know is an alpha. I’ll probably end up married to one. I could be…” I trail off. “I don’t even know if I like the idea. Being tied to someone like that.”

“Being knotted to them, you mean?” I give him a little shove, and he laughs, then says, “Marriage is tying yourself to somebody too, you know.”

“I know. But not on a biochemical level.”

They used to call the connection between mates a “soul bond” for how deep it goes, how sensitive it makes you to the other person, their moods, their wants. We know more now about how the actual chemicals at play work, which has demystified a lot of it. There’s still a kind of romance to it anyway, I guess. But mating bonds are really difficult to undo, so how are you supposed to know that the person you bite is the right one? What if you choose wrong? At least with marriage there’s divorce. Like many things, a mating bond is something I’d resigned myself to going without, although it would give me a measure of basic protection I don’t currently have.

“I’ve thought about it,” Cardan admits. “I think everyone expects me to eventually end up with Nic still, even though… y’know, and in that case I could have someone else on the side, maybe. It’s pretty common. Or I could be like your dad and marry an omega anyway.”

I snort. “Yeah, that worked out really well for everyone.”

“You know, with what we learned today, Vivi’s theory—”

“I know,” I say quickly. “I don’t want to think about it.” Because that’s how I deal with these things. I don’t think of them until I have the time and space to handle them, which may be never, and definitely isn’t now. The last thing I need is to lie awake thinking about how Madoc might be involved in all sorts of unsavory things, up to and including arranging my parents’ murder.

Cardan does not seem to be giving this the same consideration. “Do you think Madoc and your mother were mates?”

I shudder. “I _don’t_ want to _think_ about it.”

“Vivi had to happen somehow.”

I slide down the wall to my pillow and make a small keening noise into my hands. “That doesn’t mean they were mates. I think Madoc would have found us a lot sooner if they were.”

“You mean he would have sniffed her out.”

“Yeah.” I frown, slipping briefly into memory. “My parents really loved each other, though. I remember that. They’d smile at each other, they’d kiss before my mom left for work, they—” My throat seems to close, and I swallow.

“Must be nice,” Cardan says under his breath. I’m not sure I’m supposed to hear it.

I look down at my hands. I rarely allow myself the remembrances of my mom’s smile, my dad’s arm looped casually behind her when we watched movies on the couch. They were both omegas. They were happy. “I guess I talked myself out of my point. Mates aren’t the end-all be-all of…”

Either Cardan is oblivious to my musings or he’s trying to spare me from them, because he continues, “I mean, regular sex is pretty fun. The not-heat kind. The not-mate kind.”

“It is?” I ask, trying not to let the question strangle itself in my throat. “So… are you saying you’re good at it? I should know, before—if this is all going to happen.”

His face screws up in thought. “I’d like to think so,” he muses. “T-B-H, it’s hard to get honest feedback when you have this much money. Girls, boys, alphas, omegas, they all tell you what they think you want to hear. Although Nic wouldn’t let me slack off in bed, so yeah, I think I know my way around.”

“Oh, well, good. That’s great.” I sink further down and pull my blanket to my chest, looking up at the ceiling. “If my hormones don’t render me totally incoherent, I’ll give you a rating.”

Cardan cracks another smile. “Out of five stars? Like an Uber?”

“Sure. You know. ‘Smooth ride, good driver.’” I cover my face with my hands. “God.”

“Maybe you won’t have to,” he says. “Maybe it’ll be okay. I mean, sure, we are living out the exact set-up of half the alpha/omega porn I’ve ever watched, but that doesn’t guarantee anything. Remember that movie everyone was buzzing about a couple of years ago, where they got stuck in the elevator but he held off?”

“That was a movie, with actors. Not a documentary.”

“Still, we’re dealing with, what? An elevator-and-a-half, two elevators of space? Could work out in our favor.”

I pull my hands down and look over at him. “Unlikely,” I say. “But sure.”

Cardan studies me, then turns onto his side and reaches out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I’m sorry,” he says, and I am struck dumb, thinking he’s apologizing for everything he’s done to me. But he adds, “Just in case something does happen. I know… I know this isn’t what you want.”

Well, that isn’t nothing. I shrug. With him so close, smelling like he does, looking like he does, I almost think I could do worse. “I mean, it’s not like I’m your first choice.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see him purse his full lips. “Still, I wanted you to know.”

I turn onto my side to face him directly. “When’s the last time you apologized to anybody?”

“When I wasn’t forced to by an authority figure, you mean?” A little crease forms between his brows. “I honestly don’t remember.”

Definitely not nothing. I don’t feel better, but I could feel worse. “Can you do one thing for me?” I ask, and it comes out a whisper, like I’m a frightened child.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice equally soft, which just makes the whole thing even more horrible. That he’s not being what I thought. That he’s not being cruel.

I swallow, but make myself say it. “Don’t hurt me on purpose.”

Cardan’s lips part. “Oh,” he says. “Oh, Jude.”

I turn over, giving him my back. I don’t want to look at his face anymore. As much as I want to hear him say he is sorry, I don’t want to see him feel sorry for me.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Are you scared of me?”
> 
> He lets out a nervous little laugh. “Are you decent?”

Heat steals over me slowly, like fog rolling in from the ocean overnight. I have a hard time falling asleep because it hovers at the edge of my senses; a tension headache pressing at the front of my skull, the flipping of my stomach, all compounded by the aching of my injured leg. I toss and turn a little, but not much, because with Cardan next to me there isn’t much room, and I don’t really want to kick him and alert his attention.

His sleep is also restless. I’ll hear his breathing even out, and then he’ll jerk awake, suddenly, with a little startled sound, his elbow brushing my arm, the mattress shifting under him. I didn’t think someone like him would be prone to nightmares, but I guess our situation would test anyone’s psyche. A couple of days ago I would have asked, resentfully, what Cardan would even have nightmares about, but I am learning that his life is not nearly as charmed as it seems.

We must manage to sleep sometime in the early morning hours, and it is then that my heat breaks. I know it’s begun when I wake up. The room is pregnant with it, in the same way the air grows heavy and humid just before a lightning strike. I am aware of every part of my body in a way I usually try not to be: the muscles of my thighs tensing; the prickly three-day hair growth under my armpits; sweat collecting between my breasts; an urgent cramping in my lower belly that I know—with dismay—is ovarian, not uterine; a desperate, disastrous need layered in with it all.

And I am aware of Cardan.

He is fast asleep. I know that for certain, even without listening to the rhythm of his breathing, because he would never be doing this if he weren’t. He’s wrapped himself around me like a boa constrictor, an arm clamped over my waist, a leg slung over my thigh. His hand rests on the sliver of exposed skin where my tank top has hiked up, and his palm seems to burn cold. His lips press against the crown of my head in the mockery of a kiss, his sleep-breath ruffling my hair.

Part of him, however, is very much awake, unmistakably pressed up against my ass, and although I have never handled one of those on purpose I am not so ignorant or inexperienced as to not know what’s going on.

For a moment I feel as though I have left my body entirely, suspended in a weightless space between desire and panic. After that, his hand slides a little further up under the fabric of my shirt and there is nothing I want more than for him to touch me, to cup my breast, to let his fingers slide under the waistband of my shorts. And I think, _Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad_.

And I think, _What if we get it over with_?

But there is no “getting it over with,” because if we start we won’t stop, not for days, not until my heat runs its course and his rut burns away. And, with a flash of shame, with a clench in my stomach, I remember Valerian trying to pin my arms and his sour breath against my cheek as he asked me the same question. Why not get it over with? “Omegas are good for one thing,” he said. “You don’t seem to have figured that out yet.” My heartbeat rabbiting in my chest as for one terrible second I wondered if he was right.

“Cardan,” I whisper. Yesterday I had kicked him awake, but I am too frozen now even for that.

Cardan groans sleepily into my hair. His grip around my waist tightens and his hips press harder against mine and my mind completely whites out at the deep throb of dreadful want that responds. I take a deep breath, count to three, and force myself to reach back and pinch him.

I feel the moment he wakes, because every part of him stiffens. Well, every part that wasn’t already stiff.

“Shit,” he breathes, and he scrambles off of me and across the room so quickly that I am forced to wonder whether he was even there, even as I feel his invisible handprint on my waist.

I roll onto my back. Cardan is now once again in what I’ve come to think of as “his corner.” Although I try not to look at his groin, my eyes seem drawn there, and his jeans are _very_ tight, but out of embarrassment or shame or something else he has arranged his legs so that I can’t see and tugs his loose shirt down.

“So,” he says. “Uh. Morning.”

I don’t know what to say. My mouth feels like a desert. Images of—of all things—prairies at the height of the Dust Bowl that had been printed in one of my middle school history textbooks flash across my mind. Maybe I am delirious.

“It’s started,” I manage.

“Yeah, I got that.” Cardan gestures vaguely, at himself, at the room. He is in sharp focus for me in a way that nothing else is. A rivulet of sweat trickles down his neck. I want to lick it.

I am astonished that he can just sit there in his corner, although he seems more closed-off than usual. I can vaguely recall my first heat and the urge to act, even if I was too miserable to do much and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Now I know exactly what it is that I want to do. And the pheromones rolling off of me should be sending him into a rut, and alpha ruts are supposed to be a basically unstoppable force. Before suppressants, terrible things would happen if an omega was caught out in an unexpected heat with alphas around. When we woke up I thought his had been triggered, based on the erection and now the sweat. But he’s in his corner, and he isn’t coming closer.

I must really repulse him if he can resist it like that. Normally, this would just irritate me. Now, I want to yell. I want to cry.

“I...” I begin, but then I am hit with another cramp and a chill settles under my skin. Evolutionarily speaking, the purpose of heat is to mate, and there’s logic to making my life unpleasant if I don’t do that, to ensure survival of the species. Everything goes slightly sideways and makes me a little cold-blooded; if an alpha were here to help me regulate my temperature, I would be fine. But my body has caught onto the fact that Cardan is across the room instead of pressed up against me and it says _Hey, no, that’s what we want_ , as if it can decide those things unilaterally. And its main method of protest is to set everything on fire.

I can relate.

As the fever blooms, so does the sensitivity in my every nerve. I feel the underwire of my bra digging into my ribs, the stiffness of my denim shorts and the tickling of stray threads where they have been intentionally distressed. With an urgent gasp, I unzip my sweatshirt and pull it off before reaching up under the back of my tank.

“What are you doing?” Cardan asks, panicked.

I struggle with the clasp of my bra for another second before unhooking it and slipping my arms out of the straps. I pull it out from under my tank top and fling it across the room like it might bite me. “It fucking _hurts_ ,” I say between clenched teeth. I start on the button of my shorts.

Cardan covers his face with one large hand. “These are really mixed signals you’re giving off, um, right now. Are you getting naked? Please don’t be naked. I don’t know what’ll happen.”

There’s a waver in his voice that keeps him from sounding aloof and sarcastic. I sit up to slide my shorts down my legs and toss them beside my bra, then put my sweatshirt back on and pull the blanket back up. It’s scratchy, but I have to get warm. “Not naked.” I pause. “Are you scared of me?”

He lets out a nervous little laugh. “Are you decent?”

“Yeah.”

But I am watching his fingers closely as he lowers them from his face. My tongue wets my dry lips, and I wish they were his. Then there’s another cramp, and I feel—oh no. I feel the worst thing of all, because it feels like I’ve wet myself, when really it’s an entirely different category of bodily fluid. My underwear is soaked.

I’m glad I took off my shorts, I think deliriously. It would be such a pain to get this out of denim.

In this terrible moment, I am unable to believe that I have _ever_ hated Cardan. Just looking at him is an experience as visceral as being punched in the gut. I look at his mouth and my lips tingle with the thrill of imagining how a kiss would feel. I look at his long fingers and press my thighs together to stop phantom versions of them from slipping inside of me. I am incoherent with want, absolutely stupid with it, and the last remaining shred of my sanity is the only thing keeping me from crawling over to him and stripping off his shirt.

That and the absolute mortification, because it feels like my entire body clenches again and another rush of fluid follows. I let out an involuntary whimper; my face burns hot with shame. At least he can’t see what’s going on down there with my legs under the blanket. I don’t know what he can smell.

“I’m gonna—” Cardan begins, his eyes darting around the room for some kind of solution to our problem. “I’m— I can’t stay in here.”

I make myself nod. Of course he can’t. As much as I am slowly being consumed by base instincts, I am still _here_ , and the part of me that is me understands that. He can’t stay in here, because something will happen, and he doesn’t want— _neither of us_ want—anything to happen. Of course.

“But we can’t let them in here,” he says, under his breath. “I can’t let them get you. So. Okay.” He nods. “Right. Okay. I’m gonna come over there for like two seconds. Don’t move or do anything or— okay?”

“Okay,” I say. I don’t even think about what it means that I’m going along with what he says. I’m just glad one of us has a plan.

Cardan draws a breath, steeling himself, and crawls over to me. It isn’t very far. I make myself look up at the ceiling so I can’t check whether he’s still hard and pretend to ignore him, even though I can’t not be hyper aware of his presence. He pauses at the side of the mattress and takes another breath.

“Right,” he says. “Sit up for a second.”

I do. To my surprise, he adjusts my pillow, then reaches beyond it to get the one he’d slept on. He moves to put it under my head, then says, “Oh, shit, wait, your leg,” and changes his mind, moving down the mattress to prop my left foot up on it. Then he asks me to lie back down and begins tucking both blankets around me, fitting them tightly to my body.

“We have to like, smother it, right?” he says. There’s a manic quality to his voice, like he’s on the verge of babbling. “We can’t let them smell you. So if we trap the smell in the blankets, maybe…”

“That’s smart,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Although I’m afraid it’s also useless at this point. The stale air in here is already saturated with both of our scents. Cardan’s is muskier than usual today, cocoa and earth and… I break out in a fresh round of sweat, but my body also calms down a little at having him nearer, at the possibility that something might happen.

He pauses when he tucks the blankets around my shoulders, his eyes, dark as black coffee, finding mine. If I look closely enough, I can tell where his irises end and his pupils begin. They’re blown wide, although that could just be because it’s so dark in here. Still, I am captivated by the arc of his eyelashes when his eyes flick toward my lips.

“Jude,” he says quietly. The sweat is making his hair curl even more than usual. I want to mess it up so badly. I want to be kissed. I have never wanted anything more. Valedictorian, college acceptances, acknowledgment of my accomplishments, all of those wants vanish in the face of Cardan and his perfect Cupid’s bow, his full lower lips.

For one long, tense minute, we are not moving, breathing the same air. Then there is a quiet knock at the door, an almost fluttery beat, like that of a hummingbird’s wings. It’s the Bomb’s knock.

Cardan jerks back from me like he’s been hit with a sudden electric shock. “Okay,” he says, reassuring himself. “You’re as far away from the door as you can be. It’ll have to be enough. I just— won’t let them in. Yeah.”

He stands, looking down at me one more time, and then turns away. I see him subtly adjust himself before moving to stand in front of the door, blocking the entrance.

“Jude’s sick,” he calls.

The door swings open immediately.

Cardan doesn’t move. I peer at the doorway. Behind the Bomb’s slight form, I can make out the Roach, halfway to standing from his chair at the table.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asks.

“Fever,” Cardan lies.

“I should get the Ghost,” the Bomb says. I guess it’s a credit to how scared they are of Madoc that she sounds properly worried. “If her wound’s infected—”

“Then he fucked up. That’s exactly why you shouldn’t get him.” Cardan sounds properly commanding and haughty, an alpha born. You would never know he is actually nervous. I’m not sure whether I should be impressed or afraid that he’s such a good liar.

Because, of course, the reason not to get the Ghost is that he’s a likelier alpha than the Bomb. Because Cardan has made the same calculation I have: that the Bomb, a petite woman, is probably not a threat to me.

The Bomb frowns. “Did you check her leg?”

“Well, no…”

“Might as well, before we bother him,” says the Roach. “You know how he likes it up there in his perch.”

I send up a silent thank you to whoever might be listening. Cardan moves aside to let the Bomb enter, turning to watch her approach. When the Roach comes to the doorway, Cardan subtly shifts his weight to block half the entrance with his shoulder. If the Roach notices, he doesn’t remark on it.

“Jude,” says the Bomb, crouching down at my side in the space that Cardan had just occupied. “You okay?”

I blink and wrench my gaze over to her. I try to think of what I would normally say. After all, one time I went to school with a one hundred and two degree fever so as not to miss a history test. I only got sent home because I nearly fainted in gym. Our kidnappers wouldn’t know that, but they do know I downplayed being shot. That’s enough.

“I’m fine,” I grit out. “He’s exaggerating.”

Cardan rolls his eyes. The Bomb frowns. I am relieved that even this close, her scent does absolutely nothing for me, but maybe that’s because Cardan’s still lingers in the air. “Well, you don’t look fine.” She puts a hand to my forehead and the frown deepens. “Yeah, definitely warm. I’m going to take a look at your leg.”

I nod, although I don’t particularly want anyone crawling around anywhere near my lower body. Luckily, when she pulls the blankets aside, it’s only to my knee. “Hmm,” she says. “Nothing’s bleeding through. I don’t see anything weird.” She glances back at the door, and a look passes between her and the Roach that I don’t understand. “I’m going to unwrap it for a sec.”

“Fine,” I repeat.

Even though I do try to keep still while she does it, I can’t help but glance down. The wound looks okay. It’s scabbed over, and the skin is raw and pink at the borders, but it’s clearly healing normally. The Bomb rewraps my leg with steady hands, although not as well as the Ghost had.

“Well?” Cardan asks. Impatient, irritated. He wants everyone out of the room. “How is she?”

“Her leg’s okay,” the Bomb reports. Does anybody else realize the way they’re responding to him? Answering his questions, responding to physical cues? The chemical signals he’s sending out might not be driving anybody else here crazy, but they’re certainly having some effect, and nobody seems to know but me.

“Maybe a virus,” the Roach suggests. “Something you guys brought in with you.”

Cardan forces his face into a grimace. “I probably shouldn’t be locked in a tiny cell with her, then.”

“You might already have it, kid.”

“I feel fine.”

The Bomb and the Roach exchange another glance.

“C’mon,” Cardan presses. “I’ll be good. Plus, I kind of want to learn how to shuffle cards like you do. I’ve never seen anybody’s hands move that fast.”

I am forced to give Cardan a little credit here. I had noticed the Roach playing Solitaire, but I hadn’t really paid attention to anything else he did with the cards. And flattery is definitely a tool I haven’t mastered.

The Roach considers this, pressing his lips together. “All right,” he says at last. “You can sit across from me while the Bomb picks up some medicine for her. But so much as _one_ sneeze and you’re back in the room.”

“Deal,” says Cardan, who glances at me. I try to force my face to remain neutral, even though, now that he’s on the verge of leaving, everything in me is screaming for him to stay. But it’s the right thing for him to go. He doesn’t want me, I don’t know what I want, and if he stays the decision will be made for us. I still ache at the idea of him leaving. Or maybe that’s just the fever.

So Cardan, and the Roach, and the Bomb all go, and I am alone. I don’t even hear anyone secure the deadbolt. I must look really wretched if they think I won’t try to escape again.

They’re right.

I turn back onto my side, wrapping the blankets tighter around me. I don’t know how much time I have before the Bomb returns, but it has to be more time than I need for this. I shove my right hand into my underwear, which is already soaked, as I know the blankets probably are and the mattress is. I should probably treat my own body with a little more care, but I can’t exactly light candles or run a warm bath, and it’s not like I ever go easy on myself.

At first I just try to look at the wall as I work, try to concentrate on the building of sensation between my thighs, but my mind keeps skipping like an old record, and every skip reminds me of the way Cardan’s dick felt against my ass. Which does arouse me more, but also makes me nervous. Alphas are supposed to be well-endowed, but I can’t imagine it fitting. I know there is a hole in me, but it’s _metaphorical_ —the gaping maw that feeds on my accumulated trauma so I don’t have to deal with it—and while I also know biology facts like “the vaginal canal lengthens during arousal” it just doesn’t seem plausible. And anyway, none of this is sexy.

So I end up thinking about his fingers instead, even though I don’t want to think about any part of him at all. His long fingers, which are always moving, drumming on his knee, scratching at the wall, running through his hair. I think about how he said he knew his way around sex things and wonder if he could do a better job than I am doing right now. Would he be rough with me, like alphas are known to be? Or would he be gentle, with the same odd tenderness he’d shown when he tucked my hair behind my ear?

I don’t know why I break on that thought—I will never have that, he doesn’t want to give it to me, I will never know—but I do. Climax feels like shattering into a million tiny pieces. I muffle myself with the pillow, tasting dry cotton.

My face is wet, but not with sweat. I am crying. And because no one is here, I let myself cry, pretending that it’s just another symptom. That it can’t be helped. I let the tears come until they’re out of my system and my well of despair has run dry.

Then I settle in for a long and terrible day.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t kill Cardan.”
> 
> The Bomb cocks her head to the side. “I thought you didn’t like him.”
> 
> “I… don’t.”

The Bomb returns sometime later with a liter bottle of spring water and Tylenol. “Prescription strength,” she tells me, dispensing two pills into my open palm. “Good stuff.”

“Whose prescription?” I croak, sitting up. It feels like every ounce of liquid in me is squeezing itself out as sweat or something else. Masturbating only helps so much—the only thing that abates the worst heat symptoms is mating with an alpha. And since that’s not happening, it’ll just have to run its course.

Oblivious to my true suffering, she winks at me.

I throw the Tylenol back and wash them down with a swallow of cool water, then keep drinking. My mouth has grown so dry. But I wrench the bottle away from my mouth and say “Leave it” when the Bomb moves to take the pills back.

She gives me a look. “I’ll be back to give you more later, but I’m not leaving this with you. For all I know, you’d shut down your liver to make us take you to the hospital.”

I blink at her, wretchedly aware of the heat of my skin where my eyelids press together. I hadn’t even thought of that.

“Crap,” she says, fumbling in the plastic bag. “I should have taken your temperature first. Hold on, maybe we can still get it before the meds kick in.” She clicks her tongue. “Chemistry I like fine, drugs, sure—but nursing isn’t my area.”

“What is your area?” I ask. I don’t really feel like talking to anyone, but my curiosity is strong enough that I push through it. Anything to learn more about the people who’ve taken us.

The Bomb holds up her prize, a thermometer still in its plastic packaging, and grins at me. “I like blowing stuff up. I dabble in hacking. Basically, if there’s a wall, I want to bring it down.”

I shift in my blankets. It’s an endearing answer, but I worry that any positive feelings toward our kidnappers is budding Stockholm Syndrome. “This must be a boring job for you.”

“It was supposed to be, yeah.” She wrestles the thermometer out of the plastic and hands it to me. “You have a way of keeping things interesting. And Cardan’s a riot. I hope we don’t have to kill him.”

The beep of the thermometer turning on immediately after that statement makes me jump. “You said you wouldn’t,” I protest. “You said you’d take care of us.”

“I know. Our employer’s anxious about how much you’ve both seen and heard. But we can’t kill _you_ , so there isn’t much of a point to getting rid of him. And between you and me, the Roach is very fond of him.”

“So—”

“Stick that thing in your mouth,” she says. “We don’t have all day.”

I glare but stick the cold tip of the thermometer under my tongue and wait for it to start beeping again.

The Bomb leans over, reading the lit-up display—red, already a bad sign. “One hundred point nine,” she announces. “No wonder you’re miserable.”

“No real danger though,” I sigh, pulling it out of my mouth and giving it a little shake. Would they really take me to the hospital if my condition deteriorated? Maybe I should consider trying to dehydrate myself. That’s the real danger of going through heat without a partner. I could do it, I think. “Forget” to drink, drive the fever higher. But our current circumstances are already precarious, and there are a million ways this might end badly for me. The headache is pulsing stronger over my left eye already, and the last thing I need is a full-blown migraine. I take a sip of water and silently will the Tylenol to kick in faster.

“We’ll keep an eye on you,” she affirms.

I wipe my hand on the back of my mouth, already feeling a little more like a person instead of a sweaty blob of hormones. “Don’t kill Cardan.”

The Bomb cocks her head to the side. “I thought you didn’t like him.”

“I… don’t.” I cap the bottle, looking down at my hands. My cheeks are hot again, which at least means some blood in my body has decided to circulate instead of pooling in my groin. “But I don’t think he deserves to die. He didn’t do anything.”

“Hmm,” says the Bomb, mulling it over.

I jerk my head up, but she’s smiling at me. Teasing. I flush again. “I’m just saying. I don’t see you guys as killers, anyway.”

Her voice has a dangerous edge to it when she asks, “You don’t?”

I shake my head to clear it. I may be sick, but I can’t allow myself to forget where I am and who I am with. The Ghost shot me already, and it’s easier than I’d like to imagine the Roach’s twisted features contorting further as he plunges a knife into someone’s back. “Maybe just you?” I offer.

“Well, you’re not far off. Murder is a messy business. I prefer to set the charges and wait at a safe distance. But we all do what we have to.” She shifts, and I must look worried, because she adds, “He’s probably going to be fine.”

“Probably,” I echo, and then sigh. “His family’s even more messed up than mine.”

“Well, your dad _is_ Madoc.”

“My parents are _dead_ ,” I say.

“Oh,” says the Bomb. But no apology, no condolences. I kind of appreciate that. I learned a long time ago that no amount of apologies would bring my mom and dad back.

“And my sister—never mind.” I shake my head. I really must be addled if I’m spilling my guts to a stranger. _Is_ this Stockholm Syndrome? Is this how it starts? “At least she’s not trying to kill me.”

“It’s another level of family drama,” she agrees. “The Kardashians have nothing on the Greenbriars.”

I try to work out why I feel comfortable around the Bomb. I think her frankness reminds me a bit of Vivi. She never bought into the pretensions of our new life—she wanted out as soon as she was in. And she talks about it like she really is outside of it. The Bomb is like that. She says what she means. She isn’t bowled over by anything.

“How can you do it?” I ask. “How can you do this kind of work for them? Is it really just the money?”

The Bomb blinks at me, her eyes large and luminous in the dark. Her brows draw together, and she looks past me. I seem to have struck a nerve, and for a moment I think she isn’t going to answer my question. Then, at last, she says, “It isn’t just that. The Roach and I—we owe them a lot. I think if… we might not be alive now, if not for what they did.”

“That’s worth kidnapping for? Maybe killing for?”

She looks back down at me. “I know you’ve had shit happen, Jude. I’m not interested in a competition there. But I think Madoc’s kept you from a lot of bad stuff, given you options. Some of us aren’t so lucky.”

“I know that,” I protest. How many Designation Equality Club meetings had Taryn and I attended in our time? Vivi was president for a little while, I think to spite Madoc. “I know it’s not all mansions and parties. And you know, bad stuff can happen in parties and mansions too.”

“Sure. We _are_ the bad stuff.” She flashes me a grin, then says, “Just think about what could have happened if Madoc hadn’t been there to catch you guys. Where you might have ended up. What you might have done to get out of it.”

My stomach twists. I have, of course, thought about that, but it’s an alternate universe that I can’t look directly at, like a solar eclipse. It’s easier to think about two branching possibilities: parents alive, or parents dead with Madoc intervention. Thinking about Madoc never showing, about Taryn and Vivi and I getting put in foster care, maybe separated… it’s so dim and distant.

“I’m not interested in a competition either,” I tell her. “I mean, I am judging you a little for kidnapping us. I will judge you harder if you kill Cardan.”

“No one’s going to kill Cardan,” the Bomb says, patting my shoulder. “You should lie back down. I’m surprised you’ve been upright this long.”

I scowl, but my head is already beginning to feel swimmy, so I settle back into my blankets. “I’m really stubborn.”

“I got that.” The Bomb gathers up her things, but leaves the water bottle within reach. I am grateful.

Just before she can put her hand on the doorknob, I call softly, “If you kill Cardan, I’ll kill you.”

She looks back over her shoulder at me, looking oddly fond. Maybe a gang of kidnappers and thieves respects threats. “Yeah,” she says. “I got that one, too.”

* * *

Cardan somehow manages to con his way into spending a lot of time outside of the cell. I am not sure how long, because I am curled up toward the wall and barely notice the light from the window wax and wane. But as the day passes his scent starts to go stale and sour, and I pick my head up every time someone opens the door.

It’s always the Bomb, returning to give me more Tylenol or hand me fresh fruit—not fast food, therefore a luxury. It occurs to me then that they kept buying us stuff from a drive-thru or grocery store because they didn’t think they would have us for long and didn’t bother stocking up. But someone must have thought to buy one a bag of mandarins this time, because I am given a couple to nibble on after each dose.

“Boosts the immune system,” the Bomb says when she drops off the first one. She seems in a good mood, probably because the medication has managed to wrestle my fever down to a balmy ninety-nine. Achy and hollow, I just give her a nod. My hands shake when I peel it, but I _can_ peel it, and I’m grateful for that. I have been so humiliated already, and I can probably take more, but I don’t want to.

I slip into a weird daze for the second half of the day. Even though the fever is gone and my cramps are easier to bear, I find myself cursing Cardan’s name. I am pretty sure his presence made my heat worse—just the presence of an alpha, a _desirable_ one, has convinced my body that there’s a chance I might mate, so it’s punishing me worse for abstaining. The longer he’s gone, the more clearheaded I feel, to the extent that my head can clear. And I am angry, at him for intensifying my misery, and at myself, for being like this in the first place.

By the time he returns, any trace of sunlight is gone. He walks slowly, shuffling behind the Bomb. Even as she talks to me and I nod along, sticking the thermometer in my mouth, my eyes track his progress as he settles in his corner.

His hair is damp, his scent shot through with the floral soap from the bathroom. He showered before coming in. I am unreasonably jealous of him. My hair is plastered to the back of my neck with sweat, and my thighs are basically stuck together with dried—anyway, I haven’t left the room all day, not even to pee. I feel like a damp towel someone wrung out and left to dry over the side of a sink.

After I’ve taken the Tylenol, the Bomb hands me a paper napkin with two more pills folded in it. “In case you wake up in the middle of the night,” she explains.

“It’s night?” I ask.

“We sleep in shifts. If there’s an emergency, have Cardan pound on the door.”

“Why me?” Cardan asks. He’s assumed his usual posture, with his leg propped up and his arm balanced casually on his knee. I wonder if the Bomb notices the rigidity in his shoulders, the tension in the line of his mouth. I do.

“I don’t think Jude’s going anywhere anytime soon.”

I sniff derisively, which is a bad move, because I get a fresh whiff of Cardan and am forced to bury my face in my pillow to smother a whimper.

“Point taken,” Cardan says. “Night. Thanks…” I imagine the rest of his sentence curling up and dying at the novelty of him thanking anybody for anything, but he manages to continue. “Thanks for taking care of her.”

The Bomb dusts off her knees as she stands up. “No problem. If she dies, we’re extraordinarily screwed.”

“I know. Still.”

She nods, then leaves. This time, I hear her lock the door behind her. Cardan and I are once again stuck together, alone.

I turn over and curl toward the wall again so I don’t stare. It’s not like heat gives you night vision, but for a couple of seconds he seemed to be a crisp outline in the near darkness of our cell. I don’t want to be tempted. I don’t.

“How, uh.” Cardan clears his throat and tries again, awkwardly. “How was your day?”

“Sucked,” I mutter.

“Yeah.”

“Yours?”

“Sucked less, probably.” He pauses. “But still sucked. I, um, I wanted to check on you.”

“It’s okay.” I shift my head. There’s a twinge in my abdomen, but at least it’s not another full cramp. “Did you learn any neat card tricks?”

“Yeah, actually. The Roach says I’m a fast learner.”

“High praise from a career criminal.”

Cardan chuckles, and my heart jumps. I made him laugh. I don’t know why that affects me the way it does. It must be the heat, another weird side effect. “I should’ve brought the deck in. To show you.”

“If we get through this, you can show me another time.”

“Oh yeah?” I can tell he cracks a smile just by the way his voice picks up. “You’re still gonna want to hang out when we’re out of here?”

I press my lips together to keep from echoing a smile. “I don’t know,” I say to the wall. “Maybe I’ll be too busy with my cool new friends from college to make time for you. And maybe you’ll be too busy hanging out with the Roach. Although that’s honestly an upgrade from your normal crowd.”

“Ouch.”

“He’s not a douchebag alpha,” I point out.

“I don’t know _what_ he is.” I can picture Cardan shaking his head. “I sat next to him for most of the day and I still don’t have a clue. He sounds like an alpha, but he doesn’t really look like one. He doesn’t smell like _anything_. He and the Bomb seem to have some kind of communication going, but I don’t know if that means they’re mated, or… just close, I guess.”

“I think the Bomb’s an omega,” I say. “Like me. We kind of had a moment earlier.” I screw up my face in thought. “It bothers me that I still can’t get a clear read on her scent, though. Especially now. That’s weird. What do they have to hide?”

“Maybe they’re all betas,” Cardan suggests. “They don’t give off the same pheromones we do.”

I snort. “That’s not possible.”

“Betas exist.”

“Yeah. They’re one in a thousand. The odds that there would be three in one place...”

“Impossibly low, yeah. You’re right.” He sighs. “Well, we’ve seen their faces, but maybe they don’t want to leave scent markers around so they can be tracked that way. That seems like a smart crime thing… to do.”

My lips twitch again. “A ‘smart crime thing?’”

“Oh, like you could do better.”

I snicker, but then the cell falls quiet. We have officially exhausted every subject that will keep us from facing our circumstances, and we know it.

“So,” Cardan says, “now what?”

I don’t know. I cannot imagine spending the night in this cell with him, like this. But I am supposed to be the one with the plans.” “Um, I guess we try to sleep.”

“Right, right. Will it hurt your foot if I take the pillow under it? I’d ask to borrow a blanket, but…”

“No, I get it,” I rush. The blankets are in no condition to be lent, but I’ve left him without any bedding and anywhere to sleep. “Definitely take the pillow.”

There is silence, in which I can imagine him nodding, then the rustle of his clothes as he crawls over to take the pillow propped up under my leg. His hand skims my foot, and it’s like an electric current zings up my body. I hold my breath, waiting for something else to happen, but I just hear him move back to his corner.

“Do you want, um, my sweatshirt?” I offer.

He scoffs, “I don’t think it’ll fit, Duarte.”

I roll my eyes. “You’re such an asshole. To keep your arms warm, because you don’t have a blanket.”

There’s a longer pause than the situation calls for, and then he says, “Yeah, toss it over.”

I make myself sit up so I can unzip it, then ball it up and fling it toward him as hard as I can. I am not feeling very strong, but the room is short, so it lands at his feet anyway. He picks it up and buries his face in it.

“Oh, you _pervert_ ,” I scold, even as my stomach does a flip. I am surprised to find I’m not mad. I’m not even annoyed. What had I thought was going to happen when I threw it over to him? It’s saturated with my pheromones.

And my scent. Which he’s supposed to hate.

“I just,” he says, taking another sniff. There’s a fuzzy edge to his voice. “I thought it would help. Since we can’t—I don’t know, I just thought it would help.”

I force myself to lie back down and turn around and not watch, even though I am unbearably curious. My face is hot, and heat gathers between my thighs again. It’s just the pheromones. It’s just the circumstances. If my mind were less addled, maybe I could make more sense of all this, but I cannot.

A minute or so later I hear him shift again. “Yeah, it’s a good blanket,” he says. “Thank you, Jude.”

“Sure.”

Then all is silent again, and I think he has fallen asleep. It seems impossible that he could. I am so weary, but my arousal is skewering me like a hot spike, and I keep listening for him on the other side of the room. There’s no way I can seek relief with him here, and no way I can sleep like this.

“Cardan,” I say, breathily. “Are you awake?”

He whispers back, “Yeah.”

I shift. It’s like parts of my body flare to life at just the sound of his voice. “What do you think would happen if you came over here?”

“You don’t—want that, right?”

I don’t know what I want. I think I am closer to wanting him—to wanting at all—and then the memory of Valerian using his knee to try and wedge my thighs apart comes back. I pull the blankets tighter around me. “This sucks so much.”

“Yeah.”

“Less for you, right?”

“You think so?”

“I don’t know. Aren’t you flooded with adrenaline or whatever it is that theoretically enables you to keep thrusting for days on end?”

Cardan chuckles. “Wow. You must _really_ be far gone if you’re willing to put me and ‘thrusting’ in the same sentence.”

My cheeks warm. “I meant ‘you’ as in ‘alphas.’ Don’t be dumb. And aren’t you used to this?”

“From—oh. The O?”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, that’s different. They alter it somehow, on a chemical level. All of the euphoria and adrenaline, none of the, uh… the aches or the erections lasting longer than four hours. You know, stuff you want to avoid if you’re not in rut for real.”

“Right, makes sense.” I hesitate. “So, you are? I couldn’t tell.”

“What?” He sounds incredulous. “Yeah, yes, I am. Of course I am. There’s like no space between us and no ventilation. It would be impossible for me _not_ to be.”

“Alright, alright.” I squeeze my pillow a little tighter. “You just seem so…”

“So…?”

“Clear,” I finish. “And calm. Calmer than this morning, at least.”

Cardan is quiet for a second before he asks, “Remember this morning, you asked if I was afraid of you?”

My heart thumps. “Yeah?”

“I’m not. I’m afraid of me. I’m afraid of… of...” He grasps for words. “I’m afraid of all the stuff I want to do. Because I’m coming to a realization that’s very painful and you can’t laugh, but I am, and it’s, it’s important—I don’t want to be like Valerian. Or like my brothers. Or even like Locke. I want to be different. I don’t know if there _is_ a different, but I want to be it.”

I am so bewildered that I don’t reply. For as long as I have known Cardan, he’s never been anything other than a bully, a terror, delighting in other people’s suffering, reigning from the top of the food chain. He always seemed to enjoy being an alpha, relish it. I can’t make heads or tails of what he’s telling me now.

Is he saying he doesn’t want to hurt me? He’s never cared before.

But I think about him tucking the blankets around me, gingerly propping my foot up on the pillow this morning, and I wonder.

“It wouldn’t be like Valerian,” I whisper, but he must have fallen asleep, because he says nothing.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is not better in the morning.

Once again, it’s hard to sleep. I dream of kissing Cardan, who is actually Locke, and I am wearing Taryn’s pink prom dress. And that’s the tamest of them; I have more graphic nightmares that I won’t recount here, except to say that they are awful. Every time I wake up I am either too hot or too cold. I eventually decide I am most comfortable with one leg pushed outside of the blankets and fall into a light doze.

About two hours into my botched attempt at sleeping, I awaken to some odd noises and realize that Cardan is also awake. A moment later, I realize he must think I am still asleep, because when I look over at him there can be no other explanation for what he is doing.

As before, he is in slightly sharper focus than everything else in the room. I thought I’d find him lying down, but he is sitting up with his back against the wall, and his head is bowed forward. He is definitely trying to be quiet, but it is very clear to me from his weird breathing and the sound of skin on skin and the movement of his hand what is going on.

I shouldn’t watch. I know I shouldn’t. But I woke up turned on my side toward him and I can’t turn over or he might realize I’m awake. I can’t even imagine what would happen then. Would he stop? Would he come over? Would I _invite_ him over? I don’t know which possibility terrifies me more.

His breathing grows more labored and he brings his free hand up to his mouth to muffle the sounds that fall out of it. I hate the way my heartbeat skips at every one, the way every muscle in my body clenches with want, with _need_. I stay quiet, though, watching with hungry curiosity as he curls over himself and makes a strangled sound, almost but not entirely swallowed up by his palm. His shoulders shake.

When it’s over—and I am marveling at how I just _watched him jerk off—_ he sighs, a long, exhausted sigh that somehow really endears him to me. I want to crawl over to him and nuzzle at his neck. I want to drape my body over his body so we can keep each other warm. I want to lick his hand clean, a thought that I recoil from even as I have it. That can’t possibly taste good, and yet—

“Ah, shit,” he whispers. He’s looking down at his hand, and my delusional omega brain wonders if I _should_ go offer to lick it. But then he pulls off one of his already dirty socks and uses that. He got a shower today, but being stuck in a dirty room the size of my stepmother’s walk-in closet negates that fast. Honestly, after being stuck down here for days, I’m not sure we’ll ever be clean again.

Cardan’s head falls back against the wall. His clean hand grabs for something at his side, and when he presses it to his face, I realize it’s my sweatshirt. He exhales again, and it must be my imagination, but it sounds suspiciously like my name. He takes a few, deep breaths, then puts it back down and curls up on his side, using it as a pillow.

I feel like I have been holding my breath this entire time, but I keep holding it a little longer, just in case. There is a pulsing, demanding heat in me, concentrated between my thighs, but, as I always do, I push it to the side. I curl my knees to my chest, and hope it will be better in the morning.

* * *

It is not better in the morning.

When I open my eyes, it is to the migraine that threatened me yesterday finally breaking, like someone’s jammed a railroad spike into my left eye. The fever is roaring, too, and I pull my leg back inside the blankets and wrap myself up tight, but my shivering doesn’t stop. My muscles have acquired a dull ache that makes me think they’d be bruised if I could peel my skin back and look.

I think I half-expected to find that Cardan had crawled on top of me in his sleep. Then I would wake up, then he would do _it_ , and it would be an awkward thing to work around while kidnapped but at least the worst of my symptoms would abate. But Cardan is still by his corner where I’d seen him fall asleep last night, except now he’s curled up in a ball around my sweatshirt. So there would be no morning hump session, which is good, because I am not yet at the point where that seems more alluring than scary, awkward, intimidating.

My mouth is dry, and I turn over to reach for the water bottle, but it is empty. When had it emptied? Did I empty it?

“ _Cardan_ ,” I whisper. That’s all it takes to jolt him out of sleep. He sits up, and rubs his eyes, which then widen when he looks at me so I must look really terrible.

“Shit,” he says again, which brings back echoes of him saying it in the night, which just makes my entire body seize up because he’d been jerking off—over me? or over the situation?—and there was an increasingly urgent part of my brain wondering why he’d had his dick in his hand when he _could_ have put it in me. And then, _ow_ , a cramp on top of everything else. As if everything else weren’t enough.

I paw for the pills the Bomb left me and swallow them dry, hoping for some relief from the headache, even though it won’t be immediate. Then I start to push up to my hands and knees.

“No, no,” says Cardan, shoving out a hand but not coming any closer. “No, you just— just wait, I’ll get them. I’ll get you more water.”

“I can do it,” I insist, but it’s taken so much effort just to get this far up and I’m trembling holding myself in place.

“Jude, you look—” He trails off and shakes his head. It must really be that bad. I want to tell him he doesn’t look much better. The circles under Cardan’s eyes have deepened, and he’s already sweating so much that his curls cling to his forehead. But he just sets his mouth in a line and says, “Let me do it.”

In almost any other circumstance I would hate being bossed around by him, but I just flop onto my belly and groan, “Fine.”

Cardan, however, is wired. He must feel as jagged and sleep-deprived as I do, but I can see the extra jittery energy in his every step. I did make that joke about thrusting, but what happens when you box an alpha in rut in a basement with no outlet? Where does that energy go?

Apparently into his fist, because when he pounds on the door it’s so loud that I nearly jump off the mattress. My head throbs. “Hey!” he calls. “Jude needs water!”

There is no answer for a solid thirty seconds. When Cardan glances at me, I am frowning. “They’re usually right outside,” I say, and my stomach plummets at the thought that we’ve been locked in here and just _left_ with no food or water.

“They’re coming,” Cardan replies, probably to reassure himself. He bangs on the door again, this time with even more urgency. “Hey!”

A few seconds later the door opens, and it is not the Bomb standing there, but the Ghost, dressed in black, his face an inscrutable mask. “Alright, I heard you.”

Cardan takes a half-step back from the door, toward me. I pull the blankets tighter around myself and flatten my back against the wall. This was the outcome we had worried about. Everything Cardan had said and done yesterday was to keep our captors out, and especially to keep the Ghost away from me.

“You need to leave,” Cardan snarls, his hands balling into fists at his sides. I am surprised at the ferocity in his voice. I’ve seen him angry. I’ve seen him hurt people with a shove or a cruel word. I have never seen him like this.

But the Ghost is unimpressed. Probably because if it came down to a fight between the two of them, he would definitely win, even though Cardan has more muscle. “You can relax,” the Ghost says. “I’m a beta.”

Cardan blinks, and so do I. But then his eyes narrow. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

The Ghost sighs. “Ask your girlfriend if I smell like anything. Her receptors are on overdrive. Even maskers wouldn’t help.”

I expect Cardan to protest that I’m not his girlfriend, and I’m about to open my mouth to say he isn’t my boyfriend, when he looks at me and asks, softly, “Jude?”

The urge to deny anything is knocked right out of me, and I inhale, concentrating. It’s difficult to get anything beyond Cardan’s scent and mine, both of which hang heavy in the stagnant air, but I do pick out something. I look up at Cardan. “Just hand soap. He smells like hand soap.”

Cardan looks skeptical.

“I’m less of a danger to her than you are in this state,” the Ghost says. “I can help her out of the room. Let me.”

 _In this state_. He has to know, then. Uneasily, Cardan moves aside to let the Ghost into the room, tracking him as he walks over and crouches at my side. The Ghost presses a cool hand to my forehead while looking at my sweaty, tangled hair.

“Why didn’t you say you’re a beta?” I ask, shivering.

“Wasn’t relevant. When did you last take medicine?”

“A few minutes ago. What about the Roach and the Bomb?”

“Do you introduce yourself to people by telling them you’re an omega?” It’s a rhetorical question, because he then says, “We have to get you into the shower. I’ll help you up.”

I nod. I know what I look like and what I smell like, and I am not so proud that I won’t accept his help.

“Hey,” Cardan begins, when the Ghost reaches out to put an arm around my shoulder, but I give him a look and he doesn’t say anything else, although the set of his jaw tells me he’s unhappy. He crosses his arms.

“Cardan,” the Ghost says, “can you go turn the water on for her? The old heater takes a while to get started. Make it warm to start, not hot. She can turn it up if she needs to.”

“Right,” Cardan says, and over the Ghost’s shoulder I see him nod and leave.

“He listened to you,” I marvel as the Ghost peels the blankets from my body and helps me to my feet. I should feel more self-conscious that I’m wearing only a tank top and underwear and my thighs are _definitely_ crusty with residue, but he isn’t making a big deal of it, so neither am I. Besides, between my shaky legs and my bad ankle, I am a little distracted by the effort of not toppling over.

“Alphas. Temperamental, but they like to feel like they’re doing something.” It seems like a joke, but he doesn’t smile when he says it. He supports my weight easily, and with his help I hobble out of the room.

“You really don’t smell like much,” I inform him. “It’s _weird_.”

“I’m used to it.”

“Right.” Mentally, I kick myself. And the Ghost doesn’t say anything else, so I don’t either.

As he helps me across the little room, I am very conscious of my body pressed against his and his arm around my shoulder. My hormonal brain, ecstatic that I am being touched, is swimming, trying to tell me I am attracted to him. Am I attracted to him? I mean, I think he’s handsome, objectively. Should I have sex with the Ghost? I probably shouldn’t have sex with the Ghost.

But, of course, those images are provided to me unbidden because the omega part of me is ecstatic that I am willing to actually entertain my horniness. What if the Ghost helped me into the shower and he stayed there with me? And Cardan _also_ stayed? _And then what?_ My rational brain scolds. I don’t know anything about the logistics of having a threesome in a shower. It seems like an easy way to get more injured than I already am.

And while having sex with the Ghost would be simpler from an emotional standpoint because I barely know him, he is a beta, so it would not actually solve any of my current, heat-related problems. Also, Cardan would be sad.

Do I care that Cardan would be sad? That’s an uncomfortable thought.

“Oh, thank god,” I say, when we finally reach the bathroom and I see Cardan pacing back and forth in the little hallway and hear the shower stream hitting the old yellow tile in the bathroom. I can’t wait to be clean. I can’t wait for these heat-induced intrusive thoughts to go away either, but unfortunately that’ll take a little longer.

“Do you need any help getting undressed?” the Ghost asks, in a tone so dispassionate that even my omega hindbrain wilts at how obviously uninterested he is.

“I think I can manage,” I say, mostly because I can, but also because Cardan looks like he’s on the verge of tearing the Ghost’s throat out, and I still think the Ghost would win that fight but I’m suddenly not sure. We’ll all be glad when this is over.

So I limp into the bathroom, close and lock the door behind me, and tear off my sweat-soaked tank top and my underwear. Instead of standing in the shower, I grab the soap and sit right down, not caring if the floor is gross. I nearly start crying when the water hits my skin, and am almost surprised it doesn’t start steaming around me. It feels cool, so I turn it up a little until I’m comfortable. Then I begin scrubbing myself all over.

It takes a long time before I feel clean. My body still reacts to the lingering traces of Cardan’s scent that cling to my skin and hair. But I discover that someone’s stocked the shower with a set of floral shampoo and conditioner that claims to be “scent-dampening.” Small text on the back advises that they “may have diminished effect during periods of heat or rut,” but I pour a good third of the bottles out into my hands and wash and condition my hair, detangling it with my fingers. I wash my pubic hair, too, just in case it’ll help.

When I step out of the shower, feeling much better, I eye my gross clothes and dread putting them back on. But on the closed toilet, neatly folded, someone has left me an alternative: one of those loose maxi dresses you can find hanging on a rack in the back of a Walgreens, for cheap. I pull it over my head; it’s olive green, and too long, but it fits okay otherwise. There are also some soft black shorts, which I put on under the dress. There’s no replacement for my underwear, so I wash it in the sink, wringing it out as best I can, and leave it to hang dry on the towel bar.

When I step out, Cardan, who has now taken to pacing the main area with his head bowed sulkily forward, perks up. “Hey,” he says. “You look… wow, a lot better. Your scent’s— you’re better.” His nose wrinkles. “The shampoo’s a little weird, though.”

“Not a fan of lavender?”

“It just doesn’t really…” He gestures vaguely. “...like, go with you. It’s the opposite of what you are.”

I limp over to an empty chair and ease myself into it. Because I am so tired that my filter is totally worn away, I ask, “What do I smell like to you, anyway?”

“It’s…” He stuffs his hands in his pockets and fidgets. I notice his feet are still bare, and nearly blush, remembering what had happened to his sock. “It’s hard to explain. I mean, I probably smell like a lot of things at once to you, too, right?”

I nod. “But if you had to choose,” I press, and brace myself, trying to anticipate the worst thing he could say. Methane gas, rotten fish, a dump?

“Cinnamon, I guess,” Cardan admits.

“What?” I sit forward in my chair. “You hate the smell of _cinnamon_?”

“No, I.” He looks flustered, but tries to channel it back into haughty and irritable. “Don’t be stupid. I’m going to go shower.”

“But—” I begin, perplexed, but Cardan has already disappeared.

The Ghost, who had been leaning silently against the wall, pushes off of it to approach me. “I should change your bandages,” he says, crouching down to expect them. I open my mouth, but he anticipates me and looks up, adding, “I know you have questions, but I’m only going through this once. Better wait until Cardan gets back.”

I press my lips into a thin line. I can be patient when it’s important, but I am feeling frayed right now. As he is re-wrapping my leg, I blurt out, “How do you know what to do if you’re a beta?”

“What, with your leg?”

“No, with—” I look down at him and find him raising his eyebrows. He had been joking. I sit back in my chair, pouting.

“My dad was an omega,” he explains. “My mom was an alpha. I saw all sides of it growing up, even if I didn’t go through it. Three days every few months I’d be on my own.”

“Was that hard?”

“It was what it was.” He gives me another look. “Now wait.”

I scowl at him. “Can I have a mandarin?”

Maybe happy not to be talking, he gets up to get one from a bag slumped on top of the mini-fridge. I catch it when he tosses it to me, and alternate between picking at it and taking sips from a fresh water bottle until Cardan emerges from the shower, damp and cleansed of sweat. He sits down across from me, and I scrunch up my nose. Lavender doesn’t really suit him either.

“I told Jude I’d only go through this once,” says the Ghost, who seems happier to remain standing. “But I think I can guess your first question. Yes, we all knew what was going on. Pretty much from the get-go. We didn’t say anything because you guys were being cagey for some reason, but we figured we could get you the supplies you needed anyway, no harm done. I only said something because I’m the only one here, and Cardan wasn’t going to give me access otherwise.”

Cardan shifts. I ask, “Why are you the only one here?”

The Ghost blinks at me. That wasn’t the follow-up he was expecting. “The Bomb and the Roach were called away.” He shrugs. “Might be good news, might be bad. Hard to say. They figured I could handle things alone while you were in heat. It’s not like either of you are in a state to go anywhere.”

“So, what, you’re _all_ betas?” Cardan asks, cutting me off before I can follow up.

“Yes.”

He frowns. “We thought you were using maskers.”

“It wasn’t a bad assumption,” the Ghost says. “People in our line of work often do, so we can’t be traced by scent. Betas make good spies, too. Any profession that requires stealth.”

I hadn’t thought about that, but it makes sense. “So were you recruited because you were a beta, or…” My stomach sinks as I consider another possibility. “You were all, like, born… nobody made you this way, right?”

The Ghost hesitates, then says, “I was, yes. The others’ stories aren’t mine to tell.”

Cardan gawps at me. “You’re thinking they were… what, de-designated? _Why_? To make them better at… crime?”

I shudder. Forcible de-designations were categorized as human rights violations by the United Nations in the early 1970s after certain unethical human experiments came to light. Sure, there are de-designation therapies out there for people whose designations cause extreme dysphoria or health complications, but they take months. The forcible de-designations are quick, and brutal, and painful, and if the subject survives the physical complications, they might not survive the psychological.

“I hope not,” I say, quietly, telling myself that my discomfort is brought around by the idea of _anyone_ suffering such a painful ordeal, not because I like our abductors. I change the subject. “But _you_ were recruited?”

“Yes.”

Man of few words. I hug my arms around my stomach. “Must be nice.”

“The job opportunities or being a beta?”

“Not having to deal with…” I peel one hand away from my abdomen and gesture vaguely.

“No, I don’t envy that.” The Ghost looks between us. “Although I do sometimes wonder what I’m missing out on.”

I glance at Cardan, who, to my surprise, actually looks angry. “If you had fresh clothes for Jude the whole time, why didn’t you give them to her?” he demands. “Why didn’t anybody stay with her? She was stuck in her gross clothes and she was alone, all day.”

Again, the Ghost looks slightly taken aback, although he smooths his face into his usual inscrutable mask in an instant. “The Bomb got these for her yesterday, but she was curled up in her nest and we didn’t know if she’d want to move or be bothered.”

“My nest?” I frown. “No, that’s not right. I don’t have a—”

“It’s a sad nest, but you did pile all the bedding in the room up in one corner.”

“No, that wasn’t—I mean, I didn’t—” I look at Cardan in horror, as he is the one who put all the blankets and pillows on me, but he is looking away from me. I shake my head, and some wet hair falls into my face. “It’s okay that I was alone. I think it was better. Don’t worry about it.”

I feel the Ghost watching me closely, and shift in my seat. “It’s not shameful, what’s happening to you,” he says at last. “Plenty of people go through it all the time.”

“Not you,” I retort.

“Maybe not, but I’ve been around long enough and seen enough to know there are upsides to being an omega.”

“Oh, yeah?” I ask. “Like what?”

The Ghost’s eyebrows shoot up. “You want _me_ to tell you?”

“Yeah.” I glance at Cardan, who’s slouching in his chair and pretending to ignore both of us. “Tell me how my life doesn’t totally suck right now.”

He looks at me, then at Cardan, then says, “I guess I don’t have anything better to do.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t speak for me, Duarte,” Cardan says.
> 
> “Don’t boss me around.”

“But, just, if I had the choice,” I say, “I _would_ rather be apart from society.”

We’ve gone around and around a few different points by now. The latest one is the Ghost reminding me that, since betas _are_ one in a thousand, there are only three hundred thousand in the United States, which is less than the population of Wyoming, and I don’t know anyone from Wyoming. They can and do seek each other out, but in a lot of ways, chemical and social, they’re separated from everyone else.

“Would you?” asks the Ghost.

“Well…” I trail off, thinking of the Bomb and the Roach and how they, very possibly, endured de-designation one way or another. I don’t think that’s something I want for myself, not seriously. Sure, I could do without all the complications of heat, but would I like to go through life with dulled senses, knowing most of the population was experiencing something I never would?

The problem isn’t really that I hate being an omega, it’s that I spent my whole life watching alphas, surviving alphas. Wishing I had what they had.

I look at Cardan, who’s been preoccupied with picking at dirt under his fingernails this entire time. He wears a mask of boredom. I know he’s listening, though. He’s good at playing dumb.

“I want to be like them,” I hear myself say. “No, I want to be better than them. That’s all. That’s what it is. And how am I supposed to be better when I’m—” I gesture at myself. I know I look better now than I did before, but I am far from my peak.

Regarding me steadily, the Ghost says, “There’s power in what you are right now, you know. There’s power in driving people crazy for you. A well-placed omega can ruin a political negotiation, a business merger, a marriage. Start wars.”

“Helen of Troy,” I interject. We all know how that went. “That’s soft power. But I don’t want—want…”

I shiver in my chair and hug my arms to my chest. Cardan’s voice is dark and low when he says, “I don’t think she’s up for this discussion.”

The Ghost gives him an odd look, and I say, “No, I’m fine. It’s fine.” I quash down panic; the meds shouldn’t be wearing off this soon, but there’s nothing I can do about it. “I don’t want soft power. I want to be taken seriously.”

“Well, you got us to take you pretty seriously,” the Ghost replies. “Cardan takes you seriously.”

I snort. “No, he doesn’t.”

“Don’t speak for me, Duarte,” Cardan says.

“Don’t boss me around.”

“I think that when you get to college, or at least out into the real world, you’ll find it’s very different,” the Ghost continues.

“I live in the real world,” I retort.

“No, you live in a bubble. A rich person bubble. When there aren’t as many expectations—when there are just normal people—alphas and omegas don’t have as much trouble with each other.”

I press my lips together so I can’t remind him that my mom married an alpha and it didn’t exactly end well. “But systems of oppression still exist. How many omega presidents have we had?”

The Ghost holds up a hand. “We’ve been over this. I’m not saying they don’t.” He pauses. “It wasn’t a kind thing Madoc did, sending you to Insmire.”

I blink at him. “How did you know—”

“Well, we did have to do our research on you.” He presses his lips together. “Cardan said you went to school together.”

“Oh, right.” I feel foolish, and also defensive. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Cardan pick up his head. “Well, Madoc isn’t kind. I mean, he can be, but—he isn’t.”

“No,” the Ghost agrees. “If he was kind, he would have sent you to the best multi-designation or omega prep school there was. But he didn’t let you have it easy. From what I know of him, he wanted to teach you to fight, on all fronts. And from where I’m sitting, it worked. I bet your sister isn’t a pushover either. Your twin?”

I almost laugh, thinking about Taryn fistfighting anyone. But I guess we did both learn to lie pretty well. I shrug my shoulders.

“You’ve had the worst of it in high school with entitled rich kids. The real world is more balanced, and you’re more than ready for it.” He pauses. “And there is one more thing, but I don’t think you’ll appreciate me saying it.”

“Go on.”

“Mating.”

Cardan makes a choked sound.

“I don’t mean sex,” the Ghost says, with a glance at him. “I mean finding a mate. It’s something I’ve thought about, as someone who can’t have it. Sure, betas get to fall in love like everyone else, but we don’t get to have that… connection. That belonging.”

Neither Cardan nor I speak for a moment. We are both too busy looking at the ground. “It’s a lot of pressure,” I say slowly. “What if you pick the wrong person? How do you know?”

“You might.” The Ghost sits back in his chair, seeming to retreat back into himself. I have the feeling this is the most he’s spoken in one go for a long time. Then he says, “But what if you pick the right one?”

I open my mouth to reply when I am hit by another full-body shiver, and then my cramps return with a vengeance. I whimper and wrap my arms around my abdomen. “ _Ow_.”

“She’s getting worse.” It’s Cardan who says it. He sounds newly panicked. “You have to help her. I can’t do it.”

The Ghost raises his eyebrows. “It’s okay for me to help her now?”

“Yeah, well, you were doing _alright_ , keeping her distracted, so I guess you’re ready for more responsibility.”

I blink up at the Ghost, who’s already standing from his chair. “You were distracting me? How long has it been?”

“A good couple of hours. You like to argue.” He helps me out of my seat. “He’s not as stupid as he looks, is he?”

“No,” I say through gritted teeth. “No, he isn’t.” Standing takes most of my concentration, but I look back over my shoulder at Cardan, who’s rigid like he’s grown roots. His hands have a white-knuckled grip on the side of the chair. He nods at me, and I nod back at him and let the Ghost lead me away.

The door to our cell-room had been left open while we were talking around the table, so it’s no longer as stuffy. I let out a groan of relief when I sink down onto the mattress. My gross, terrible mattress. My itchy blankets. I am so happy to be back in a visceral way that I don’t quite understand. Because it’s my “nest,” I guess. I want to wrap myself up in the blankets and curl up in a little ball, but the Ghost is still standing here.

“We have to lock Cardan in with you at night,” he says quietly. He sounds apologetic. “Especially if it’s only me on watch. There won’t always be eyes on him.”

I shrug. “He hates me. I’ll be fine.”

The Ghost’s mouth presses into a thin line.

“Oh, what?” I scoff. “You’re taking your eyes off him right now.”

“Yeah, because I can feel _his_ eyes boring holes in my shirt.”

I snicker. I have decided that as far as people who’ve shot me go, the Ghost really isn’t so bad. “Hey,” I begin, wincing through another cramp, determined to keep distracting myself. “Why are you doing this? The Bomb said she’s sticking with whoever you work for because she owes them. Same for you?”

“No,” he says flatly. “I’m too far in to get out.”

“That can’t be true. I mean, if you go to the police, bargain for immunity in exchange for testimony…”

He gives me a dour look that says I’m being incredibly naive. “Ask me whose house this was.”

I blink at him, wondering if the connection should be obvious and the fever is slowing down my brain. “Whose house… was it?”

“It was being built as a weekend home for someone’s mistress. It was never finished.”

“Why? What happened to her?”

He looks me over, withdrawing further into himself. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll get you more medicine. You should rest. The second half is going to be harder than the first.”

“It is?” I ask, my voice sounding small and pathetic, but he has already left.

* * *

I don’t remember much about the next twenty-four hours. Just flashes, impressions, snippets of conversation. People are in and out of the room, making sure my water bottle is full, replacing it if it isn’t, giving me pills, for all the good they do. At first it’s the Ghost, but eventually it’s the Bomb, which means she’s come back. My ears, straining to pick out Cardan’s voice through the closed door, hear the Roach’s laugh, so he’s returned too.

It’s a bad day. It doesn’t take me long to sweat right through my dress, and it takes even less time for my shorts to soak through. The medicine can’t keep my temperature in check anymore, only drive it down to a balmy one hundred. I am miserable, and I am _bored_. There is nothing for me to do but stare at the wall, and even if there were, I probably couldn’t focus on it. My head feels like it’s being weighed down by a bag of rocks. The only thing that seems fully awake and alive is my libido, spiky and insistent. I didn’t know it was possible to feel this sick _and_ this aroused. Masturbation doesn’t help. Nothing helps.

I am aware of Cardan coming back into the room, hours later. I am aware of his footsteps on the floor, the sound of him sitting heavily on the floor. I get a fresh waft of lavender; he showered again before coming in. Even though I had been dozing and wish again to be unconscious, I do pick up my head to look at him.

“Hi,” I say.

He raises one hand in greeting. “Hey.” He looks less like himself than ever, pale and drawn and wilting, and his brows are drawn. But he’s still handsome. Even the paleness benefits him, setting off his dark hair. Like a vampire. I have the urge to press my mouth to the column of his neck again.

Instead, I ask, “What’s wrong?”

“Aside from everything?” Cardan sighs. “I don’t know. The Bomb and the Roach came back, but something is weird. They wouldn’t talk about it in front of me.”

“Oh,” I say. That should mean something to me, but it doesn’t right now. I can’t fit the pieces together.

He sighs again, a longer sigh this time. “And I’m feeling like a pretty shitty alpha,” he says.

“Why?” I ask, drawing my knees in tighter to my chest. “Because you haven’t boned me yet?”

Another strangled noise escapes him. I’m getting used to those little squawks. “One, never say ‘boned’ again. And two, no.” He sounds sullen. He rakes his hand through his hair. “Because I’m not taking care of you.”

My brain short-circuits. “What?”

“I talked to the Roach about it.” He pauses. “I mean… if we _were_ paired up, if we were doing this on purpose, it should be me. I should be helping you. Instead I have to let other people do it.”

“But we’re not paired up, and that _is_ taking care of me. In these circumstances…”

I trail off, and he shrugs. “Yeah, I guess.”

“It sucks,” I say, as if agreeing with him. “And it’s—I’m just scared.”

He tsks, tossing his hair out of his face. “Nothing scares you.”

I pull the blankets tighter around my shoulders. “That’s not true. I’m scared all the time. It’s why I’m so angry at everything, everyone. At myself.”

Cardan is quiet for a moment, then says, “I guess I get that.”

I wonder if he does. There is a lot I still don’t know about Cardan. “If the last year has shown me anything, it’s that I can’t control anybody else’s behavior. Locke. Taryn. Valerian.” I shift. “Just me. It’s just me. I’m the only thing in my control.”

He smiles, weakly. “Slow down, Hamilton.”

“It’s Burr. And that’s not the lyric.”

“Whatever. Nerd.”

My own smile is transient. “Anyway, now I’m not even in my control. Now I have to be afraid of myself. So that… it just sucks.”

“Yeah.” After another stretch of silence, Cardan asks, “Are you afraid of me?”

I don’t answer him right away. Because the answer, of course, is _yes_. Yes, I have been afraid of him for such a long time. Yes, I am afraid of what he represents, the power and the system set against me. Yes, I am afraid of the way he affects me, the things I want to do, the vulnerability in me.

But the answer, in some strange way, as we have languished in our cell, has also become _no_.

“I,” I begin, but then there is another urgent cramp, another painful jolt of arousal on its heels, and I groan. “Oh, god.”

Cardan’s eyes widen in alarm. “You don’t have to answer that,” he says quickly. “Just… just relax. Just chill. I’ll stay over here.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I manage through gritted teeth, clutching my stomach. It is, of course, worse.

Trying to get comfortable, I toss and turn for ages, but I must fall asleep through the pain because the next thing I know, Cardan is gone again, and I am holding a scrap of soft cloth in my arms. On instinct, I bring it to my nose. It smells like Cardan, that musky smell he’s taken on in the last couple of days. Warmth bursts in my chests like a firework. It’s his shirt. He left his shirt with me. What is he wearing now?

It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I nuzzle the fabric. It is not exactly soft, a little grimy from lack of washing, but saturated with his scent. I am amazed at how my brain calms just from this one, simple thing. My horniness problem is not solved, though, so I slide my hand into my shorts to take care of it, my face still pressed to Cardan’s shirt. It muffles my cries when I come, but I’m honestly too far gone to care if I am heard. After I am finished, I wriggle out of my dress, pull the shirt over my head, and promptly fall back asleep.

I doze fitfully. Someone comes to replace the water bottle, which briefly wakes me long enough that I roll around for a few minutes before I’m out again. I don’t mind that the mattress is lumpy or that the blankets scratch my skin; whenever something begins to bother me too much, I stick my nose in the collar of Cardan’s shirt and breathe in, which is usually enough to soothe me.

I’m not sure whether I’m dreaming or awake when I feel someone press the bottle to my lips and say, “Drink, Jude.” It sounds like the Roach, or maybe Madoc. I open my mouth and manage a couple of swallows of water before putting my head back down and dragging the blankets up over my shoulders.

“Is she still asleep?” I hear Cardan ask. His voice is hushed. The smell of him doesn’t bother me so much now that I have his shirt, but I do scent him and groan softly, pressing my face into the pillow.

“Mostly,” says probably-the-Roach.

There’s a pause, then Cardan asks, “Can I do it?”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I know, but I want to help.” Something shuffles, like he’s kicked at the floor. “She’s only like this because of me.”

The Roach sighs, then says, “All right. Come over, but be careful.”

I hear Cardan’s footsteps on the floor, and then a hand pushes some of my hair off of my sweaty face, dragging down to skim my cheek. I lean into his hand. It feels so good to be touched.

“Jude, hey,” he says quietly. “Can you pick your head up a little higher for me?”

There’s something beneath his voice, a dark undertow that pulls me down. I find that I want to do what he says, which isn’t a remotely comforting thought. But I pick up my head, and he keeps one hand against my jaw as he tips the jug against my mouth. A little water trickles down my neck, wetting the shirt he lent me, but I swallow most of it down.

“That’s good.” He takes the jug away and sets it back down on the floor. I can hear the strain in his words, like he’s fighting with himself. “Really good.”

His hand finds my hair again, and I would do anything for him to just keep running his fingers through it, but then the Roach says, “I think that’s enough.”

Cardan disentangles his fingers from my hair and stands; I hear him step back. “It’s just so weird,” he says. “It’s weird to see her like this. She hates—she never asks for help. I’ve never seen her vulnerable.”

“Well, her body’s treating it like a sickness,” the Roach says. “But we’re looking out for her. Another, what, day or so? Less than a day? And she should be free and clear. And hopefully by then this will all be over and we can let you guys out.”

“Yeah.” There’s a pause, and then, “Thanks.”

The Roach chuckles. “Don’t thank me, kid. We kidnapped you.”

“I know, but.” Cardan hesitates. “Is it weird that in some ways I’d rather be here than home?”

“Pretty weird, yeah.”

“Yeah.” Then, lowering his voice to a whisper, he asks, “Jude?”

I say nothing, do nothing. I want to keep eavesdropping. He wouldn’t be saying half of this if he thought I was awake. So I keep my breathing low and even, and let him say what he wants.

But he says nothing, and for a second I think he’s getting ready to leave me alone again. Then I hear him take a step— _toward_ me—and his hand is briefly back in my hair. I feel warm lips against my forehead, soft and fleeting like the brush of a butterfly’s wings. I have to fight my every instinct not to lean up into the kiss and give myself away, but then his hand and lips are both gone. I hear the quick retreat of his footsteps, the closing of the door.

“It’s not fair,” I whisper to the empty cell. “You can’t just _leave me_ with that.”

But he can, and he did, because he assumed I was asleep. He left me with the memory of a forehead kiss, with a whispered conversation to dissect, and a tingling feeling throughout my entire body.

“I hate you so much,” I say, curling closer around his shirt. There is no answer but my erratic heartbeat, drumming out a truth I am almost, but not quite, ready to hear.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No, Cardan doesn’t hate the smell of cinnamon. And maybe somehow, inexplicably, he doesn’t hate me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very sorry to have fallen behind on comment replies these past couple of weeks! I'll try to catch up, but in the meantime, please know that I read every single one of your comments and appreciate them immensely. ♥

I don’t know when I decide it.

Maybe it’s in that moment, curled up on that mattress, clutching at his shirt and wishing it wasn’t empty. That a boy was there to fill it with warmth and body, the shape of his kiss lingering on my forehead, the ghosts of his fingers in my hair. I stay like that for a long time, marveling at his gentleness. Then I peel off my dress and pull on his shirt. It’s big. It makes me wonder about the way he’d fit on me, against me.

Maybe it’s later, when the Bomb comes to check on me and sits down with me for a while, talking to me as I swallow my pride and blink back tears. “You’re doing so well,” she says, with her knees pulled into her chest, rocking back and forth on her heels. “You’re great. Not too much longer now.” And when she puts her hand on my shoulder, I wish she was Cardan, that her small hand was his larger one.

Maybe it’s after that, when the Ghost hangs out with me for a little while, standing, not sitting, propping himself up against the wall. “You want to watch anything?” he asks, as I blink at the glare in his palm and realize this is the first phone I’ve seen in almost five days. “News? _Bachelorette_ season recaps?” I ask him to play an old episode of Buzzfeed Unsolved if we have the bars for it, and he does, tilting the screen in my direction. I appreciate his aloofness—it makes me feel like my situation is less dire—but I wish I were watching it with Cardan.

Maybe I never decide it. Maybe it was always decided for me, all the way back when I hit puberty, when I came back to school and suddenly he was the only thing I ever wanted to smell again. I don’t know. I don’t want to believe that biological determinism runs my life, that all our choices are coded into our genes. I want to have free will. Yet maybe it does all come down to that moment, when I scented him, and then a breeze picked up my hair and drove him absolutely bananas.

Because that must have been what happened. Because Cardan doesn’t hate cinnamon at all. Because he was just in here to help me drink down my water and tell me I was good. Because he tucked my hair behind my ear and seemed so sad when I asked him not to hurt me on purpose. Because he sat in the chair outside and rattled off a list of supposed achievements of mine, things he admired me for.

No, Cardan doesn’t hate the smell of cinnamon. And maybe somehow, inexplicably, he doesn’t hate me.

I don’t know when he decided that any more than I know when I decide this. Maybe it’s the spur of the moment. By the time Cardan returns that night, I am once again drenched in my own sweat and various other fluids, I am just about on the verge of screwing anything or anyone, and it feels like fire ants are crawling all over me. Still, I think I can push through it. My symptoms have been steadily escalating, so it’s not like any of this is new, just _worse_.

“Hi,” Cardan says, folding himself up in his usual corner. Lavender lingers in the air, riding the coattails of his scent. “How goes it?”

“Bad,” I manage. Single syllables are about my limit, even though the worst of my cramps have subsided for the moment.

“Yeah. I could’ve guessed.” He pauses, wrestling with himself over something. “Um, this is going to suck, undeniably, but I’m kind of glad to be back in here.”

“What?” I pick up my head. “You’re crazy.”

“For sure. You knew that already, right?” He laughs at himself, tilting his head back, exposing his throat to me. I think my mouth starts watering. _God_ , I need this to be over. “But out there I kept wondering how you were doing. I was really distracted. I wanted to keep checking on you, make sure you were okay.” He shrugs. “It’s just… like, alpha stuff. Hardwired, instinct stuff.”

“Yeah,” I say mildly. I put my head back down.

“I can’t wait for this to be over.”

It’s weird how his words echo my thoughts. Feeling defensive, I say, “So you can go back to just caring about yourself?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Jude, if you think I care much about myself, your brain really is scrambled eggs.”

“I think you’re vain.”

“You would be too, if you were me. I like to look hot and wear nice clothes, so what?”

I roll my eyes.

“Vanity’s not what I’m talking about,” he continues. “Self-preservation, either.”

“What _are_ you talking about?”

“I don’t know.” He runs a hand through his curls, distracted, restless. “I don’t know. But I don’t think either of us are very good at it.”

I turn over then. I don’t want to talk to him anymore. There’s a feeling in me, like smoldering embers, that has very little to do with my heat, with fever or desire. It takes a little prodding to realize that it’s annoyance, or even anger. I’m angry with him. Why am I angry with him?

Because I remember Cardan saying _he wanted to take care of me_. And the part of me that I tamp down on, the omega part, the vulnerable part, the part that is now exposed and very naked, very raw, wants that so much. If he doesn’t hate me, what is he waiting for? He’s the alpha. Everything points to him making the first move, and he is _not moving_.

Is he going to make me do it? He’s going to make me do it. Well, I hate him for it. I refuse.

Except when the next cramp rolls through me, it decimates my self-control.

“Cardan,” I whine.

Cardan has not said anything in a few minutes, so I think he might be sleeping, but he picks up his head immediately. “What, what is it?”

“Come here.”

I hear him inhale sharply. “Oh, fuck. Jude, no.”

“ _Why_?” On the verge of tears, I try to twist toward him and end up with my shirt—his shirt—hiked up, my body tangled in the blankets. They scrape at my skin, but if I throw them off I’ll be too cold. Everything is discomfort, everything hurts. “Why _not_?”

He doesn’t answer.

“You think I’m disgusting,” I say for him. Some part of me is aware that I am babbling. Some part of me is aware that none of this is true. But it’s what I know. It’s what I revert to. And it’s easy to believe. I certainly _feel_ disgusting. “You hate me.”

“No,” he says again, more quietly now.

“I _know_ you hate me. You don’t want to want me. It’s okay. You don’t—have to like me.” My body spasms again. I thrash in the blankets. “Just touch me.”

“Jude.”

“It hurts _so much_.” My face is wet. Have I started crying? I rarely cry at pain. It must be sweat.

“You’ll hate me.” He’s trying to hold firm, but his voice shakes.

“I hate you a-already.” I duck my head into the pillow. I am not sure that’s entirely true anymore.

There is a long silence. In between my shivering and snuffling, I can hear the sound of Cardan’s breathing, ragged and heavy. “Are you sure?”

I nod, then remember he can’t see me very well. “Yes, yes. Just—”

I don’t know how he crosses the room so quickly, but one minute he is there, and the next he’s climbing on top of me, pulling down the blankets I’ve swathed myself in. I’m lying on my stomach, so I can’t see him, see what his face is doing, but I feel him. His hands are warm when they brush my skin. They do say alpha blood runs hot, don’t they? I feel a spark with every touch and can’t help writhing, trying to pull closer to him. My legs are still caught in a sheet.

“Okay, okay,” he says. “Okay. Just—hold still, okay?”

That’s easy for him to say. I growl, but still as best I can. With him so near, I am shaking.

Cardan pulls the borrowed shirt up over my head, the skims a hand down my bare spine. “God,” he says, and it’s kind of a sigh and kind of a growl in return. “You, I mean… Jude…”

“Hurry _up_ ,” I snap.

He takes his hand away, and I nearly sob. But then I hear fabric rustling behind me and realize he’s just pulling off his own shirt. He practically falls on top of me after, and when he slides a hand around me to rest against my lower abdomen, I can feel him trembling too.

“Oh, fuck,” Cardan breathes, when that hand trails into my shorts, between my legs, and he feels how absolutely soaked everything is —which would make me want to die of embarrassment if I wasn’t aching to be touched. I press into his hand, rub into it, and bite into the pillow under my face to keep from being too loud.

I kind of expect Cardan to pull out some of the cheesy lines alphas are _supposed_ to say, like to tell me how wet I am or chuckle and say that I want it _so_ bad, don’t I? But he’s as quiet as I am and just as desperate. His breath is hot and ragged on my neck. He makes a cursory effort to finger me and then abandons it, pulling my shorts down instead and positioning himself behind me. Maybe I should care that the foreplay’s cut short, but I don’t. Fingering’s not going to help me feel any better, I just need him to—

And then he does.

 _Oh_.

I bite down hard again and accidentally catch my tongue in my mouth, tasting blood. That _hurts_.

“Jude?” Cardan asks, breathless. I must have made a sound.

I shake my head; isn’t he supposed to be so flooded with hormones that he’s incapable of coherent thought? I certainly am. “Go, _go_ ,” I urge him. It’s the only thing I can seem to say.

He starts moving his hips against mine. At first I think he’s trying to take it slow, but he quickly loses the plot. Both of his hands grip my waist, pulling me into him, pulling us together and apart, and I hold onto the pillow for dear life to muffle the sounds I know I’m making.

It doesn’t hurt, not after the first couple of thrusts. Does it feel _good_? It’s hard to say. It feels necessary. It feels like _so much_. And just when I think that maybe being filled up by him isn’t so bad, that maybe it’s actually kind of good, I am caught unawares by an orgasm that’s more like a full-body convulsion. There’s not a lot of pleasure in it, but at least there’s something like catharsis.

Cardan moans and surges forward, his chest pressing against my back. He isn’t done yet, but his rhythm is breaking, his hips rolling into mine at desperate, uneven intervals. I can’t think about what any of that means as I let my own climax work through me. All I know is that he’s suddenly gripping me tighter, and he presses in— _all_ the way, all of him—and his teeth sink into my neck, just above the juncture with my shoulder.

“Ow!” I yelp, jamming my elbow back into his side. “What the _hell_?”

He comes back to himself and releases me. “Sorry, I’m—sorry,” he says, and I’m surprised how easily the words fall from his lips. He nuzzles the place where he bit me, then lets out a nervous chuckle. “That, _oh_ , that wasn’t on purpose.”

I am confused for a moment before I remember what I had asked of him, just before all of this started. It is hard to think. “Are you _trying_ to end up with a mate at nineteen?”

“Twenty.”

“Whatever. Get off of me.”

Now he pauses. “I… can’t.”

I kick myself. Of course he can’t. We had discussed this, and both of us know the logistics of it. We’re stuck like this for a while. I am uncomfortable and relieved at the same time; a choice has been taken away from me, but maybe it’s okay. The heat rolling off of him is keeping me comfortable, and he is trembling, oddly vulnerable. I’m not alone in that. Even better, my brain is no longer clouded by fever. It must have broken while we were distracted.

“Here,” he says, and he rolls us onto our sides, which is a little better. His arm is draped over my waist, and his skin is still warm—warmer now that I don’t feel so feverish. I can feel his face pressed to my hair, hear his breathing, so when he inhales deeply, there’s no hiding it.

“Are you smelling me?” I mean for it to come out hard, annoyed, but instead I feel like it sounds curious and calm. I am so tired, and a little achy, but water has been thrown over the frantic fire in my chest.

“What?” Cardan’s voice is soft and sleepy.

“Never mind.” I shift, settling against him. “You were definitely smelling me.”

“Mmm.” He noses at the nape of my neck. “You smell good.”

“The pheromones must be going to your brain, Greenbriar. I could have sworn I reeked.”

Now Cardan outright laughs. “You’re the worst omega I’ve ever met, you know.”

“You’re not such a great alpha either.” I turn my head to try to look back at him. “You don’t hate me?”

It comes out as more of a question than I mean for it to be. Cardan shifts uneasily behind me. “You should try to get some sleep. It’s probably going to start again soon.”

“Can you _sleep like this_?” I ask, incredulous. He is very hard and still very inside of me. But I think I had expected that to feel worse than it does, awkward and invasive. Instead, I am strangely comfortable. I got used to him quickly, and now he fits.

“Well, I guess I’ll find out— _ah_.” He presses his forehead to my shoulder and I feel his cock twitch inside me which is, frankly, weird. His hand grips my bicep, hard, and he shakes all over again. “ _Oh_.”

“So that seems like a ‘no,’” I manage, feeling flushed all over. I had almost forgotten the purpose of knotting us together like this was to lock in semen and ensure a better chance of pregnancy. Ugh. I should be getting some of those spontaneous, rolling orgasms, too, but I don’t know if I want them. I mean, yes, in theory, orgasms are good, but not being able to control when they hit…

“I’ll get used to it.” His voice is strained.

“All I’ve done is sleep for two days,” I say, but I have to stifle a yawn as I say it. I also sweated, and shivered, and maybe cried. Plus, it’s not like any of the sleep I got was particularly restful. But I won’t admit he has a point about trying to sleep. “So you… do you _like_ me?”

Cardan smooths his hand over my side. His trembling has subsided, and he turns his head to rest his cheek against my shoulder. “That’s what I was going to tell you,” he says, “when I followed you to the beach. Before we got taken.”

Nothing, not even the fact that I just had sex with Cardan Greenbriar—something that hasn’t really sunk in yet—could have shocked me more than that admission. “ _What_?”

“Yeah, I was going to say, uh, sorry, and that I thought you were cool, and that maybe we could start over. Locke said Taryn said you’d be there, and I figured I wouldn’t have a chance once you got busy with college, so—”

I cut him off, because it seems like he might go on forever if I don’t. “So you were going to be like, ‘Sorry for the years of psychological damage, I actually like you, can I make out with your face?’”

“Yes?”

I laugh wildly. It’s like someone’s stuck a key in my chest and unlocked it. “Wow, you are _really_ bad at this.”

He groans. “I know.”

“I would probably have punched you.”

“You’d be well within your rights.”

I pause. “Are you into that?”

“Huh.” Cardan considers this. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t actually know. I’m going to go with ‘No, I’m probably not into erotic face-punching.’ Except maybe if you did it.”

“Oh my god.” I hide my face in the pillow even though he can’t see me. “Terrible alpha.”

“The worst.”

“You _like_ me.”

He drapes his arm over my waist. “You’re okay.”

“You do,” I insist, more to contradict him than anything else. Do I believe it? It is so hard to believe. And yet… “It’s the most… it’s the most stereotypical thing in the world. It’s a cliché. Alpha likes omega, alpha makes omega miserable over it.”

“Alpha and omega get locked in a basement together for a few days.” He nuzzles my shoulder. “That’s how that normally ends up, right?”

I shake my head. I don’t understand how I feel so different. Our circumstances haven’t really changed. Sure, I’m not in excruciating agony anymore, but we’re still kidnapped, waiting for ransom or rescue. And yet it’s like every part of me that was coiled up has come loose in his arms. I blink. “We had sex.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” I can picture his brow furrowing as he asks, “Wait, did you somehow not notice?”

“I should be freaking out,” I inform him. “I mean, this is—you’re—”

“Your body’s flooded with happy chemicals right now,” he reminds me. “Dopamine or whatever. If you’re going to freak out, it’ll happen when your heat’s over. _All_ the way over.”

“Yeah, right.” I shiver, but pleasantly. I’m not sure if it’s an aftershock or something else. The mattress is still grody, the blankets are still scratchy, but I am somehow more cozy, more at ease, than I can remember being in a long time. I yawn again. “Cardan?”

“Mm-hm?”

“I think I could sleep like this.”

His hand brushes my hair away from the nape of my neck, and I feel his lips come to press against it. “You should,” he says. “I’ll make sure to wake you up before it starts again.”

 _Again_. There’s going to be more, at least a few hours more. I don’t know what to do with that information, so I don’t do anything with it. That’s a problem for the Jude who’s had a little bit more rest. With Cardan’s face against my hair, and with his body fitted against mine, I steal a precious few minutes of real sleep for the first time in days.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t you trust me?”
> 
> “Absolutely not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jude has a brief PTSD nightmare in the middle of this chapter, but if you've made it this far in the fic, you should be okay. Just a small heads up. ♥

I wake up to Cardan nosing the back of my neck, murmuring my name.

My head is fuzzy. I blink my eyes open and, before I am totally aware of what I’m doing, I turn over onto my back so I can look at him. The echo ripples through me from years ago: _on your back, like a good little omega_. I swat it away. Not now. Plenty of time for shame later.

The light from outside is still so low that I can barely see Cardan’s face, but I know he’s close from the way his breath tickles my ear. And that’s not all I can feel. He’s hard against my thigh. I try to run through the sequence of events that probably happened while I was dozing. Round one had ended; round two is just starting. I wonder how long it had taken for his first erection to subside, or for him to get hard again. I guess I have another shot at finding out.

The insistent pang in my low belly, my constant companion these last two and a half days, throbs with urgency. I can feel the heat rising in my cheeks, my skin prickling. We’re not out of it yet. It’s not done.

Cardan brushes my hair back from my face. “Jude?”

A question this time. Something flutters in my chest. Those words still lurk in my subconscious. Maybe I should feel ashamed now. Maybe this is all I’m good for.

But against all that, I say, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

I nod. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Cardan pauses. “One second.”

“What—” One of his hands brushes my thigh, and I give a full-body shudder. He starts tugging my shorts the rest of the way down my legs. We were in such a hurry that they hadn’t really come off. I prop myself up on my elbows and look down at him. “What do you mean one _second_?”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Absolutely not.”

He flashes me a grin. His teeth are so white. Without quite realizing what I’m doing, I touch the place where he bit me, wondering if I can still feel their indentations. “Trust me for the next few minutes.”

“Why—” I begin, but then he gently pushes my hand aside and presses his lips to my neck. I feel weirdly heady, but cover it up by rolling my eyes. “Fine. But you’re on thin ice.”

“Yes, Alpha,” he says dryly, and my heart gives a thud so hard I feel it in my teeth.

I am so distracted I don’t realize his hand is stealing between my legs again. This time, instead of going straight to fingering me, he just touches me, almost leisurely. It takes him no time to find my clit, which is deeply unfair. I groan as he circles his fingers, taking his goddamn time. Not fair. I wonder if he can unhook a bra on the first try, too. His mouth is on my neck, and now my shoulder, and now my collarbone. I am heating up so fast, I think I am going to spontaneously combust before we can even have sex again.

“You know,” he says, sounding infuriatingly self-satisfied as he moves himself a little lower down, “this is _way_ better.”

The sound that comes out of my mouth is somewhere between a whimper and a moan. I don’t know what to call it and am deeply embarrassed that I made it.

At first I think he might go down on me and feel something between anticipation and panic—panic because it’s basically been a swamp down there for days and I really wouldn’t want anyone putting their mouth on me, and also because, as dumb as it might sound, I haven’t gotten to shave. But he stops with his head about level with my chest, and cups my breast in his free hand, which makes me draw a breath in anticipation, but is nothing compared to the sensation that zings through me when he puts his mouth to my nipple.

“Oh,” I whine, and slide my hand around the back of his head to root in his thick, dark curls. “Oh, _god_.”

And of course it’s when he has me off-balance that he slides his fingers inside of me, two of them, slowly at first. I feel them curl and look up at the ceiling, clutching his hair for dear life, and think, _Huh, he does know what he’s doing_. He makes a sound but doesn’t falter, not with his mouth or with his fingers, his thumb now circling my clit, the pressure in my body building—

It’s too much. It’s too much.

“Stop,” I cry. “ _Cardan_ , stop, stop.”

Right away, he stops. His hand withdraws and he picks up his head, his dark eyes wide. “What? What’s wrong?”

What is wrong? I blink and my eyelashes feel wet. “I don’t,” I begin. Oh, I’m panting. “I’m going to—”

He gives me a sideways look, confused. “Yeah, that’s the point.”

I am equally confused and, more than that, overstimulated. Short-circuiting. Why isn’t he being selfish? Alphas are selfish. “But you haven’t.”

“Oh, god.” Cardan leans forward and presses his forehead against my shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. You’ll make it up to me. Do you want to come?”

My feelings are scattershot, frayed wires sparking, but I nod, because I do. I really do.

“So let me take care of you,” he says. He pushes me back so I’m lying down, my head on the pillow, and goes back to work, paying attention to my other breast and rebuilding the rhythm he’d established with his fingers. It isn’t automatic, but eventually I let myself be overwhelmed. I let him overwhelm me. And when I clench around his fingers, when everything seems a little too much, I don’t fight it.

You know how in old movies when people are about to go to bed together they pan away to fireworks in the sky? It’s like that behind my eyelids, resonating through my whole body.

Cardan is there when I come back to myself, of course. He rests his chin on my sternum and smirks up at me. In that moment, seeing how pleased he is, I want to make him feel as vulnerable as I do. I want to take him apart. I want him.

I growl and drag him up by the shoulders, and that smirk becomes a gasp when I reach down to wrap my hand around his cock. I nearly gasp, too; his skin is hot under my fingers, and he’s so hard that it must hurt. Good, I think deliriously—I was in agony for days, after all. But my heart probably isn’t in it because I’m trying to wrap my legs around his waist and get him _in_ me.

“Wait—here—” he says, through gritted teeth, and he lines our hips up a little better. My hand falls away so he can enter me unimpeded. It’s easier than the first time because I am warmed up, because of all of the fluid, but there is still that beautifully unbearable friction. This time, I moan openly before pressing my face to his shoulder to muffle it, and he responds in kind, quieter but clearly less self-conscious.

He seems a little more in control of himself this time, working up to a demanding pace with surety. My hands roam up and down the skin of his back, which I’m surprised to find is not smooth, like I thought it would be. Instead, my fingers run over ridges of scar tissue, raised lines striping his back, a few of them. I would ask, but it is very much not the time. I tuck the knowledge away for later and concentrate on matching the rhythm of his hips. Not that I have to work very hard. With him, it’s easy. Our bodies seem to just know what to do.

I feel his breath on my cheek and realize his face is right there. What would happen if I tried to kiss him? There’s a chance he’d turn away. Omegas are for mating, not kissing—that’s what locker room talk would have you believe, no matter what the Ghost thinks or how he says the world works outside of what I’ve seen of it. Omegas are disposable, and when they aren’t… well, my mom did run from Madoc. But Cardan likes me. He said he _likes_ me.

Worst case, would it really be such a bad thing if I kissed him and he hated it? I definitely don’t mind making him uncomfortable. We’ve done more than kiss—we’re doing more right now—plus, kissing him is an easy way to confirm whether or not he does like me.

And if he does, I’ll know. And if I know, I can use it somehow. Because if the real power is in being wanted, then…

I tilt my head up and brush my lips against where I think his must be, and end up finding half-mouth, half-cheek. Cardan freezes, and I feel a little thrill of satisfaction at being—right? wrong?—before he turns his head and finds my mouth with his again.

It’s like I’ve stuck my finger into a wall socket after being told explicitly not to. That is, it’s _electric_ , and also like I might die from it. For a second we’re both holding our breath, closed lips pressed together, then I open my mouth and Cardan groans, clutching my face in his hands and kissing me hard. Now we’re truly right up against each other, my mouth to his, my chest against his chest, as though we could match heartbeat if we just got a little closer. His thrusts slow, but not in a bad way; they become deeper, more deliberate, like he’s trying to draw this out.

It feels surreal. It feels the way sex looks in movies. There’s nothing embarrassing about it. I am always watching, always analyzing, always anticipating, but now I am thinking of nothing but his skin against mine.

The end of this round is much less dramatic than my first panicky orgasm in the middle. I just hold onto Cardan, my arms around his shoulders, my legs wrapped around his waist, and let go, just as he does, his face now in the unruly cloud of my hair, the rest of him taut and shaking. When it passes, I lie there under him, breathless and slightly stunned. He doesn’t seem much better off. His entire body goes slack against mine.

“ _Oh_ ,” he says in my ear. “Oh.”

I turn my face toward his in the dark. “What is it?”

He picks up his head a little, enough that I feel his mouth brush my cheek in passing. His arm reaches across me to brace itself against the mattress, and then his face is above mine again, black eyes shining. “That’s what that’s supposed to feel like.”

“Haven’t you had sex before?” I am incredulous. “Haven’t you had sex before a _lot_?”

He huffs a laugh. “Yeah. But not like that.”

I try to puzzle out what he means. I mean, in rut, with knotting, sure, and this time had gone a little smoother than the last, so that could be all. I’m pretty sure he’s been with omegas before. And I know he’s had a least one serious relationship, although that was with Nicasia, an alpha. Not that Cardan and I have a relationship of any kind, so that’s not comparable at all.

We’re stuck face to face this time, but at least he’s given me a model of what to do. To make it a little comfortable, I roll us onto our sides again, and he lets me. Then he kisses me again. We stay like that for a while, just kissing, riding out the residual tremors of climax.

I’m a little disappointed when he stops kissing me, but his wild grin more than makes up for it. He shakes his head. “I can’t believe you asked me to stop.”

“I was overwhelmed!” I exclaim, blushing fiercely. I am very glad it’s still dark. “Scrambled eggs, remember?”

“Huh?”

“My brain.”

“Oh, yeah,” he chuckles. “For real. And you’ve really never…” He trails off, trying to figure out how to phrase his question. “Like, what’s the furthest you’ve gotten?”

I raise my eyebrows. “What do you think?”

Cardan shrugs. “I don’t know. Locke implied some things.”

“Ugh, Locke.” I pull a face. “Locke barely got a hand up my shirt.”

He raises his eyebrows back at me. “Did you slap him for it?”

I shake my head. I can’t bear to tell Cardan that Locke, to his minimal credit, scaled back his advances when I seemed skittish. “I punched Valerian, though, and he technically didn’t even get that far.”

Cardan frowns. “Whatever he did, it wouldn’t have counted,” he says, surprising me. “You know that, right?”

“I’m pretty sure it would have.”

“I mean, not in the way I’m talking about. In the way that matters.”

I don’t know what to make of this at all. I have always thought of sex as something tthat would someday be done _to_ me and not with me; it never occurred to me to differentiate between what I do or don’t want. That it makes a difference. I draw a line up and down his bicep, and before I can stop myself, I am asking, “How many of your times haven’t counted?”

“Oof.” Cardan is quiet for a second, then says, “I’d like to think they all have, but… I have done some things, shall we say, under the influence that I probably shouldn’t have. Wouldn’t have, if I had been sober. So, there’s that.”

“Yeah,” I say. It’s about what I expected him to say. I don’t want to ask him the horrible question of whether this counts, right now. Because, despite the horrible circumstances, I think it counts for me. I feel oddly brittle when I think about how it might not for him. So I ask a different question. “What about the scars on your back?”

“Aha.” Cardan puts his head down on the pillow. He was waiting for me to ask, I realize. “I fought a bear.”

“It feels like you lost.”

“Hmm.” He leans forward to tuck himself against me. My head fits perfectly under his chin. “You should see the bear.”

“I’d like to. Does he have a name?”

There is a long pause, then Cardan says, so softly I almost don’t hear him, “Yes.”

I reach around me to run my finger over one of the lines. I vaguely recognize the pattern and what might have made it, but people aren’t supposed to get flogged anymore. Instead of my angry fire, I feel fathomless sadness. The list of suspects is small, and none are good news.

I ask slowly, “Do you want me to kill him for you?”

Cardan lets out a little disbelieving laugh. “No. Thank you, but no.”

“I mean it,” I say, and am sort of surprised that I do. I had made a similar promise to the Bomb while I was delirious. Now I am much more clear-headed, although possibly a little dickmatized.

“I know. It’s complicated.”

“What’s complicated about it?” I demand, picking up my head. “He hurts you. What else is there?”

He lifts his hand and runs it through my messy hair. “Let me put it another way,” he says, curling a lock around his finger. “If it turned out Madoc actually did plan your parents’ deaths like Vivi thinks, would you still love him?”

I open my mouth, and then I close it.

“See.” I can hear his rueful smile. “It’s complicated.”

I put my head back down. I want to call on my fire and say, _Of course I wouldn’t love him. Of course I would swear to enact revenge on him for all my days_. But even as I think it, I remember how he rested his hand on my shoulder when he came to retrieve us from the hospital that terrible night, how he taught me to protect myself, the pride in his eyes when he watched me graduate. And I know it is not that easy.

“I was born when my father was in his sixties,” Cardan says, resting his chin on top of my head again. “I was an alpha, at least, but I was premature, and small. Dain tried to convince my father that I was defective, that I shouldn’t inherit anything. I overheard him talking about it on the phone. He didn’t care if I knew. And that part didn’t work, of course, but some of that idea stuck with dear old dad, or maybe he was just too old to have a child underfoot. He didn’t really raise me. No one did, until I started acting out in school. Then they sent me to Balekin.”

“To make you behave?” I guess. “Or, no… to make you more alpha. To toughen you up.”

“Yeah.”

I can connect the dots from there. Cardan got bumped down to my year, and he got worse. Maybe not when teachers were looking, but worse all the same. His home being hell didn’t excuse that, but it did explain a lot. “From where I’m sitting it just made you a terror.”

“Well, you’re not wrong. And by certain philosophies, that is how to be an alpha.” He pauses, stroking my hair. “But I’m beginning to think there are other ways, too.”

* * *

I am on the cold floor of my own basement, the one in Madoc’s mansion, wrapped in the scratchy blanket that used to be one of the layers on the king bed in my parents’ house. I’m not naked anymore, but fully dressed in my school uniform: white, collared shirt; blue and green tartan skirt and the bicycle shorts I always wore under it; too-long socks.

Valerian is here. I know before I even see him and dread looking up. But I do, like my eyes are the camera lens in a movie, drawn unfailingly toward the source of motion and conflict. His nose is bloody, his eye blackened, and he is sneering.

I try to roll away from him, but I’m caught in the blankets, and I panic. He plants his foot on my hip. “No, you don’t,” he says. “You should have just let me do it then if you were going to let _Cardan_ do it now.”

“Shut up!” The more I try to struggle away from him, the more tangled up I become. The thudding of my heart is so loud in my ears.

Valerian snorts derisively and wipes the blood away with his hand, smearing it over his face. “You’re a filthy animal,” he snarls. “That’s all you are. That’s all you’ll ever be.”

My eyes snap open.

I am back in our cell. Cardan is stretched out next to me on his stomach; we must have both been asleep when we came undone. He is completely naked, because I have stolen all of the blankets. Dawn is beginning to shine through our one tiny window. I am on my back, staring up at the ceiling, trying to make my heartbeat settle, the shapes resolve themselves.

“Jude?” Cardan asks, feeling for me blindly with an outstretched hand. “Whatsit?”

“Nothing.”

He opens one dark, sleepy eye. “That’s a lie. Bad dream?”

“No.” I roll onto my side to face him, pulling the blankets over my chest. “I’m really okay.”

Cardan’s hand settles on top of the blankets, pressing gently against them, which just makes my heart race again and undoes all my hard breathing work. “Your heart’s going crazy.”

“Are you a doctor now?”

“And you _smell_ freaked out.”

My brow furrows. “You can’t smell when I’m freaked out.”

“I can. And when you’re angry. Your scent gets all… spiky. Spicy.”

“That’s racist,” I deadpan.

“No, it’s not,” he scoffs, but then he looks mildly concerned and sits up halfway, propping himself up on his side. “Wait, is it?”

I sigh. “Fine, you’re right. It was a nightmare.” I hold up my hand, tracing the outline of it against the ceiling. “But I’m fine. Dreams can’t hurt me. They’re just dreams.”

“Yeah,” says Cardan, but he sounds unconvinced.

“Aren’t you too horny for serious talk?” I ask. I can feel from the urgency of my pulse and the faint tingling in my fingers and toes that we’re not out of the woods yet. Admittedly, the nightmare did kind of dampen any urge I had to touch anyone ever again, but that’s not a problem he should be having.

“Um.” He glances down at himself. I also glance down. At that moment I am _so_ glad I’m not a man; they can’t hide anything. His voice is strained when he says, “I mean, kind of horny, but obviously if you need to talk—”

I shove his shoulder to turn him onto his back, then crawl over to him. I’ve watched some porn, and also, you know, _television_ , so even though I’ve never done this, I know how it’s done. I push myself up and swing my leg over him to straddle his hips. I have never gotten to be taller than Cardan before, but it’s not just the angle that changes him. He looks up at me like I am a beautiful stranger, someone he’s never seen before and might never see again, and then he tries to blink it away, but he’s too slow. I feel the breath woosh out of my chest.

“You’re trying to distract me with sex,” he accuses.

That was what I was trying to do—distract him _and_ myself—but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I just want to have sex with him. Maybe I am choosing him just to choose him. Is that better or worse? I push my hair back over my shoulder, shaking it out. “Is it working?”

“Uh-huh, it’s—working great.” He runs a hand down my thigh. “But do you have it in you?”

“Yeah.” I nod, too, to drive the point home. The warm flush is starting to return to my body, but not as strong as before. My heat is finally, finally coming to an end. “One more time.”

“Okay.” He places his hands on my hips. “I should probably—”

Before he can tell me what he should probably do, I sink down onto him—and then gasp, because gravity is working with me this time so it happens way quicker than I thought it would. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s startling.

“ _Jude_ ,” he groans. “I was going to say I should probably _warm you up_.”

“I’m plenty warm,” I say, moving my hips experimentally. As long as the heat lasts, I shouldn’t need too much stimulation to get going. I feel so _full_ of him that it’s intoxicating.

I thought being on top would be more of an up-and-down motion, but it turns out grinding down on him or rocking back and forth feels just as good. I am surprised to find that I am not at all self-conscious, maybe because I have the best view of Cardan yet, and he is watching me like I’m a miracle, like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he takes his eyes off me for a second. I run my hands over his shoulders, scratch my nails a little against his chest, just to see him bite his lip. Not the fake lip-bite he’d do in front of a camera, either. One he can’t help.

“ _Jude_ ,” he says again, moving up into me as I grind down on him. His hands stroke up and down my thighs. His eyelashes flutter. “God, you’re so fucking pretty.”

I pause. “What?”

“Oh.” Now he looks startled. “Uh, I meant you’re—”

“You’re pretty, too,” I say, before he can take it back. A smirk is curling the edge of my lips. He is pretty, underneath me, his hair spread out on the pillow like that, his face flushed. Even the tips of his ears are red, although that’s probably from embarrassment.

Cardan blinks at me, then recovers his dopey grin. “Damn right I am,” he says, and then he shifts, coming to sit up with me in his lap. He cards his fingers through my hair again. “But you’re something else.”

I look at him, at his perfect, stupid, handsome face now nearly level with mine, and my heart aches in my chest. Soon my heat is going to break. We’ll have no reason to do this ever again. And when we’re let out of our cell, one way or another, we won’t even have a good excuse to keep in touch.

All at once, I realize how much I don’t want that. I don’t want it to be over.

I reach out to touch his cheek, and he presses his hand against mine, holding it there. “Do you trust me?” I whisper.

He watches me with those fathomless, dark eyes, and says, “Yeah, I do.”

Maybe that’s the wrong answer. Maybe he shouldn’t. But I guess he’ll find that out for himself.

I lean forward and sink my teeth into his neck.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Does this mean we’re free to go?”
> 
> “I… don’t know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fifteen is a nicer number of chapters anyway. 😉

Cardan and I pass the water bottle back and forth until it’s empty, without speaking. When he reaches over and sets it down on the floor beside the mattress, I know what he’s thinking. I’m thinking it too, but I don’t want to voice it aloud, because that would mean moving and doing, and neither of us want to do that. I want to stay tangled up in the admittedly horrible blankets, my side pressed against Cardan’s, while I catch my breath and take stock of myself. I feel drained and thirsty, but strangely loose, like someone’s stretched me out with a taffy machine. Like the kid in _Willy Wonka_.

But I am also sore, in ways I did not expect and in places that I did not expect either. Thighs, yes, of course. But my core? If I clench my abs it hurts. And inside, too, I feel a little scraped raw, and I wonder how I’m supposed to bang out a whole heat without tearing something if this is how I am after just a few hours. The first time is supposed to be a little worse, though. A little more awkward. Maybe the next one will be better. Then I realize I am making plans for the future.

I stop looking at the unfinished basement ceiling and look at Cardan instead. We have come uncoupled from our final round, so he is next to me, not flush against my back or chest like he had been. The light plays on his tousled hair and his cheekbones and very full—even more full now that they are swollen—lips. He’s always looked like a statue carved by a sexually frustrated hand, and this is probably the most obscene I’ve ever seen him, but there’s something at peace and almost angelic about him right now. I don’t know whether to be bothered by it or not. I look at the ceiling again, tracing a line of tubing with my eyes.

“They haven’t come to check on us in a while,” I say at last.

“Yeah,” Cardan agrees, but he doesn’t move to do anything about it.

“We should figure out what’s going on.”

“Well, we were very loud.” He grins. “They probably didn’t want to interrupt.”

His smile is infectious, but my own fades quickly. I glance at him, then beyond him to the door. “It’s been like twelve hours. I think we need to check.”

“You think _I_ need to check.”

I roll my eyes. “Yes, Alpha.”

“Oh, _no_ ,” he groans, bringing a hand to cover his face. A blush is creeping into his cheeks. “Don’t do _that_.”

“It’s the only time you’re going to hear it.” Very lightly, I kick his shin. By now he knows if I meant it to hurt him, I’d just hurt him. “Go on.”

Cardan groans again, then rolls to the side of the mattress, rummaging for his clothes. I am disappointed when he stands and pulls his jeans back on, but, since his back is turned to me, I take a second to admire the way they sit on his hips. He actually has a nice ass, and it feels weirdly refreshing to allow myself to think it without judgment. A lot of guys don’t. I can see the scars criss-crossing his back now, and there are fewer of them than I thought, and more faded. I am relieved for a second—fewer scars have to be a good thing, right?—until I remember that there are plenty of other ways to beat Cardan without leaving permanent marks and feel a flush of anger.

“You okay?” he asks, pulling a white shirt I haven’t seen before over his head. “You’re all over the place.”

I bristle. He’s referring to the thing both of us are avoiding. I can sense him too now, the same looseness I feel in my body, the relief, and the same spiky undercurrent of nervousness. It has to do with scent, to how we’re now much more attuned to the chemicals the other person gives off. I should have known better than to open myself up to something like that.

Before I can open my mouth to dismiss his claim, Cardan twists around to look at me. The t-shirt he’s wearing says “I went to the Hamptons, and all I got was this T-shirt!” in big, kitschy blue lettering, and I nearly choke on my own laughter.

He pulls the shirt out, frowning as he reads the lettering. “I mean, is it that bad? Gauche is kind of in, right?”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“I know. You like it.” Cardan crosses the room and knocks on the door. “Hello,” he calls. “It’s safe. We’re done now.”

There is no response. I sit up, wincing when my abs protest. They’re usually pretty prompt.

Cardan’s frown deepens. He knocks harder. “Hey!”

“Do you hear anything?”

“No.” He slams the flat of his hand against the door. “But they can’t have just—”

I feel the panic rising in him as it rises in me. Would they leave us shut up in here? Cardan and I had both started to like our captors, especially as they helped us through the ordeal that was my heat; it was easy to forget that they were career criminals, not paid to be kind. If they or their employer had no more use for us, would they leave us locked in here to die?

“Try the knob,” I suggest.

Cardan puts his hand on the doorknob, rattles the handle, and looks dumbstruck when the door springs open. “What the…”

I scoot to the end of the mattress closest to the door and peer outside. I see no one. The chairs at the folding table are empty. “They left?” I ask, incredulous. “They just _left_?”

Cardan rubs the back of his neck. “Were we _that_ loud?” Off my derisive look, he adds, “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Does this mean we’re free to go?”

“I… don’t know.” Wrapping one of the sheets around myself, I stand too. “We probably shouldn’t waste the opportunity.”

“Right,” he says, still dazed.

“Shower first,” I add.

He swings his head around to look at me. “They could come back. You sure you want to waste time on getting clean?”

“We didn’t stay alive all this time just so Madoc could kill you if he smells you on me.”

Cardan goes pale. “That is a very good point.”

I start gathering up my clothes—sweatshirt, shorts, tank top, discarded bra—while he goes to start the water. My ankle hurts less now, although it still twinges if I put too much pressure on it; three days off of it have helped it heal, apparently. I’ve never been great at giving myself recovery time, but maybe there’s something to be said for taking breaks.

When I limp to the bathroom, Cardan has already stripped down again and is washing off in the shower. He left the door open, so nothing is hidden. I nearly drop the clothes I am carrying, and scold myself. It’s not like I haven’t seen him before. It’s not like he wasn’t just _inside_ of me.

But seeing him now, in the light, his skin glistening from shower spray, rubbing himself down with soap, is a completely different experience. I shake myself all over, remembering that he can sense me now and determined that he not know the extent of what I feel, because what I feel has so many dimensions—lust, longing, genuine affection—that I am a little scared of it. I drop my blanket and my clothes in a heap against the wall and join him under the water.

He both is and isn’t surprised when I step into the shower. I know he can sense me without looking, just like I’d know what direction to walk to get to him if we were dropped miles apart. It’s that thing we’re not talking about, that neither of us will name. Naming it will make it real. So instead of saying anything, Cardan picks up the bottle of lavender shampoo, squeezes a little into his palms, and begins massaging it into my hair.

I work very hard not to moan, but I do brace my hands against his chest. I allow myself that luxury. A splotch of color catches my attention, and I slide one hand up and gently press my fingers against the bite mark on his neck. “Did I do that?”

Cardan smirks, continuing to massage my scalp. “Yeah.”

“Huh.” I trace it with my fingers. “Are you mad?”

He pauses, and I have to force down a surge of panic. “I wish you’d asked,” he says at last.

My face burns. “I got carried away.”

“If you’d asked, I would have said yes.”

I look up. His mouth is curved with a sly little smile. My heart thuds.

“This is going to surprise you, but I haven’t gotten to make a lot of choices, historically. Not important ones.” He resumes lathering my hair. I have a lot of it. “I would have chosen you. I wish you’d let me.”

“Well, I—” My tongue feels thick and heavy in my mouth. “I’ll remember that for next time.”

He snickers. “Yeah.”

I step back to rinse out my hair. He watches me, not bothering to disguise it when his eyes trace over my body. Nothing’s going to happen. We’re both worn out. But, here and now, I don’t mind being looked at. My body, for all its myriad imperfections, got me through these last harrowing days, from escape attempt to the end of my heat and everything in between. He can like it. Maybe I can like it, too.

I stand on my toes to kiss him, and he wraps his arms around me, kissing me back as the water washes the last few days away, leaving behind the cloaking scent of lavender. When my hair is clean, I pick up the shampoo bottle and squirt some more into my hands. I hold my palms out to Cardan, who bends his head to me. And I help him get clean, too.

* * *

“You’re walking a little funny there,” Cardan says, later.

I glare at him over my shoulder. He is dressed, clean, his hair still dripping from the shower—and grinning like a cheshire cat. “I still have a bad ankle. So what?”

“No.” He circles his arms around my waist and pulls me into him, so my back comes to rest against his bare chest. I take a deep breath. His skin is still so warm. Nuzzling the side of my head, he says, sounding a little awed, “I did that.”

“And? Do you want a medal? Come on, we have to—” He starts kissing my neck, and I am briefly torn between rolling my eyes and pushing him back into our cell and onto the terrible mattress. In the end, I do neither. I close my eyes and let my head fall back against his shoulder. “Cardan.”

“I know.” He buries his head in the juncture of my shoulder and neck. He seems to like it there. “I know I know I know. Just a minute. Here.”

He takes my hands and pulls me across the basement, sitting in the empty chair that would normally belong to the Roach and positioning me so I stand in front of him. To my surprise, the next thing he does is wrap his arms around my waist again and bury his face in my stomach.

“Let’s not go up,” he says, his words slightly muffled by my tank top. “Let’s live in this basement.”

I rest my hand on the back of his head. “We can’t do that.”

“Maybe we can. The Roach was teaching me some stuff. Maybe we can get by stealing snacks from convenience stores and just be bandits forever. Basement bandits.”

I stroke my thumb through the short hairs at the nape of his neck. “I have college.”

“You can commute.”

“Oh, sure.” I place both my hands on his shoulders and give him a little push. “C’mon.”

He doesn’t budge. “It sucks out there, you know,” he says. “It really sucks. And it doesn’t make sense, I know it makes no sense, but I think this is the best thing that could have happened to me.”

“Aside from all of the parts of it that were terrible,” I point out.

“Yeah,” he agrees quietly. “Aside from that.”

“That _was_ most of it, you know. I feel like the last few hours are really coloring your perception…” I trail off. “You don’t want to go home,” I realize aloud. “That’s what this is.”

Cardan’s shoulders tense. “Forget it.”

“Hey—”

He releases me and stands up. “You’re right. We should go.”

“Cardan.”

It seems like he is already halfway up the basement steps. Stupid long legs. I jog after him as best I can, catching up to him just after he pushes the door open. And then he is just standing there, taking in the ruined—or unfinished—house. I forgot that he hadn’t seen it before. With the sunlight streaming through the rafters, it is a pretty striking sight.

I find myself blinking. Has the sunlight always been this bright? I shield my eyes with my hand.

“What is this?” Cardan asks quietly.

“The Ghost said it was being built for somebody’s mistress,” I reply, even though that doesn’t really answer his question. “He said it was never finished.”

His frown is back. “But who—”

Then he stops, straightening, and I hear what he hears: the screeching sirens, then the unmistakable sound of roaring engines and car tires flattening the grass outside. We glance at each other and, unified in purpose, race to the front of the house.

We burst out the door to find four police cars, an ambulance, and two unmarked black cars swarming the house, tires screeching as they brake. The black cars race up the side of the field and come to a halt. The driver of the first one barely waits for the car to truly stop before he emerges, moving with surprising agility. His shoulders are broad, and even the adrenaline of the situation isn’t enough to suppress his slight limp.

Cardan is clutching my hand, or I am clutching his. “It’s Madoc,” I whisper. “Madoc is here.”

But Cardan is staring too, because the person who emerges from the second car is another familiar figure. This one has his cheekbones, his dark curly hair. “My brother,” he says, sounding surprised.

I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing—that Balekin is here, that Balekin _bothered_ —but I give his hand a squeeze and let it go, knowing one of us needs to do _some_ thing, make this almost normal. I start across the field, intercepting Madoc a few yards from the house. His face is a storm of emotions and they are all unreadable to me.

“I,” I begin, but then he pulls me, one-armed, against his shoulder, and into a hug.

Madoc is, as a rule, not very affectionate. He loves us, although there has always been something terrifying about being loved by him, but he hasn’t hugged us since we were children. But he is hugging _me_ , _right now_. His hand presses against the back of my head, like he is afraid that I will be taken again if he lets me go.

“Dad,” I whisper, and I let myself lean into him. My shoulders shake, and I tell myself I will not cry, I won’t. I am done with crying.

“Jude,” Madoc says. “I thought I’d lost you.”

My heart strains at its seams. Maybe I will cry.

But then I feel a prickle of awareness and pick my head up to look over at Cardan. The police are busy securing the perimeter, so Balekin has gotten to him first, and is talking to him in a low voice. He has his hand on Cardan’s shoulder. It might be friendly, brotherly. But tension in his Cardan’s posture makes me think it is not.

“Wait, just a second.” I make myself pull back from Madoc, then walk over to where Cardan is standing.

Balekin takes a step back. There is a smile on his face, which could be kindly, but has too sharp an edge for that. “Jude Duarte,” he says, by way of greeting. “I understand I have you to thank for my brother’s safety?”

I bristle, because I know he must see this as a mark of Cardan’s lack of worth. Protected by an omega. It takes a lot of self-restraint not to grab Cardan’s hand again. “We looked out for each other. He saved my a—me, too.”

“Hmm.” Balekin’s eyes narrow.

“Can someone tell us what’s really going on?” Cardan asks. I feel his discomfort like it’s mine. “What the hell happened? How did you find us? How are you _here_?”

“Your phones and wallets were turned in at the police precinct,” says Madoc, coming up to join us. “Along with GPS coordinates leading to this address.”

Cardan and I look at each other. “Well, I won’t have to get my driver’s license replaced,” he jokes. “Good. Hate the DMV.”

“But who did this?” I ask. “Who was behind it?” I look at Balekin before I can really stop myself.

He raises an eyebrow, but he says, “Our brother, Dain.”

“He confessed?” Cardan asks, disbelieving.

“In a way.”

“He’s no longer a concern,” Madoc says with a finality that indicates no further questioning will be entertained.

Cardan and I look at each other. “But—” Cardan begins, just as I say, “ _Why_?”

“The details don’t matter,” Balekin says. “Cardan—”

“We should let the paramedics examine them,” Madoc interjects. “Jude’s wounded.”

“It’s really a scratch,” I protest.

“Great!” exclaims Cardan, walking past me and toward the ambulance. Balekin looks frustrated, but lets him go and stalks back to his own car, pulling his cell phone out of his pocket. I move to follow Cardan until Madoc lays a hand on my shoulder.

“Jude,” he says, in a low voice. “That boy.”

I notice the furrow of his brow, the slight flare of his nostrils, and wish the earth would swallow me up. “It’s all right,” I say, avoiding his searching gaze. “It isn’t his fault. He didn’t do anything I didn’t ask for. We were trapped together for a long time.”

“I didn’t think you were friends,” he says. There is a slowness to his words that suggests he’s choosing them carefully. Or maybe he’s judging me.

“I’m not sure what we are.”

“It’s very clear what you are.”

“ _Dad_ ,” I whisper, scandalized.

His face softens. “We’ll figure it out. If you say he helped you, then I will take you at your word.” He releases me. “Go get looked at.”

To escape the conversation, I am more than happy to oblige.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
> 
> “But that’s ridiculous,” I protest. “You hurt me all the time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a brief mention of (supposed) suicide in this chapter.

The day is bright and pleasant, but the sunlight and soft breeze are an assault on my senses after my time underground. I limp to the ambulance, which is parked on the grass, rear doors open, waiting for me. I ease myself to sit in the back, next to Cardan, who inexplicably has a blanket tightly wrapped around his shoulders. When I’m no longer standing, I sigh. I’d thought that after sitting and lying down for days I’d be desperate to move, but it turns out I’m actually very tired. When no one is looking at us, Cardan leans over and nuzzles my nose with his.

I smile at him weakly. Everything is too much and not enough. It seems to me that I am watching Madoc and Balekin talk to the detectives from very far away, like they are characters on a TV show. I just want to go back to the Amagansett house—or my actual house, hours away—and curl up in a bed that’s mine. But that fantasy leads to complications too. What will Oriana say when she learns what I’ve done? What will _Taryn_ say?

Not wanting to spiral, I search for anything else to talk about. “Are you cold?” I ask Cardan, glancing at the blanket.

“Oh, no. It’s for shock or something.” He looks down at himself. His kitschy t-shirt is partially obscured now. “But, you know, free blanket.”

“Yeah,” I say, like that makes perfect sense. My head is spinning. “Was Balekin… happy to see you?”

He sets his jaw. “He was glad I wasn’t dead, I guess. But that’s about the only thing I did right.”

I look down as my fingers curl into my palms. I don’t examine how much I want to wrap my hands around Balekin’s throat. “My dad knows,” I whisper. “About us. I think I’ve talked him out of killing you.”

“That’s good. I’d rather not die after surviving all of this already.”

“You’re taking this really well.”

Cardan shrugs. “If we’re bonded now, and your father _isn’t_ going to kill me, that means I’m part of your family. Dain is dead, and Balekin will find it harder to touch me.”

“Oh,” I say dully. No wonder he wasn’t that mad at me mating him. We can’t stay in the basement forever, but he still has a way out. It makes sense. I can hardly blame him.

“Not that I’m necessarily thrilled that your dad could have any sway over me, given that he’s maybe a murderer and almost as scary as you are.”

“Right.”

He cocks his head at me, sensing my reticence. “Jude.”

I look away.

He leans over again and nudges the nape of my neck with his nose. “Hey.”

“What.”

Cardan chuckles, but it sounds nervous. “Jude, I’ve thought about mating with you since I was fourteen. And back then it made me feel panicky and trapped—”

“That’s just what every omega wants to hear.”

“God dammit. Look, I’ve always been afraid to want things—not clothes and shoes and shit, things that _matter_ —because they’re always ruined. I always screw them up, or someone else screws it up for me. This is…” Out of the corner of my eye, I see him look down at his hands. “I didn’t want it to happen this way, because who would? But I want to help you through the next heat, and the next one. Actually do it right. I _want_ to be your mate, Jude.”

I turn back around to stare at him, incredulous. “You want that?”

He nods, slowly.

“But you—you didn’t. For days, you didn’t. You held off and it should have been impossible if you actually—wanted me.”

“Well, it _felt_ impossible.” He lets out another nervous chuckle. “I wanted you so bad, but more than that I wanted you to want me. I didn’t want to just go and mount you or whatever the hell I’m supposed to do. For once, I wanted to be better. Sounds crazy, right?”

“Yeah,” I say slowly. “It does. You wanted to mate with me so bad that you didn’t mate with me.”

“ _Jude_. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” I protest. “You hurt me all the time.”

“Yeah, I did.” Cardan looks down at his knees. “But not like that. Never like that. I may have made some off-color jokes, but I would never have done what Valerian tried to do. I mean, I hoped I wouldn’t, and now I know.”

“You made me miserable.”

“I know.”

“I definitely _shouldn’t_ want you as a mate.”

“No, I guess you shouldn’t.” Cardan sounds resigned, and hangs his head. “Well, the pheromone marker cleansing is kind of time-consuming and expensive and unpleasant, but I guess—”

I thought hurting him might feel good, but it just feels like a hollow pang in my chest. I ask, “You want me to be your mate, though?”

He looks up at me with those dark eyes. “Yes,” he says.

I nod. “Okay.”

“Okay?” He stares at me, a grin that he doesn’t dare unleash just yet tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“Yes. I hated you so much for so long because you smelled so good and you were so _mean_. So if you could stop being mean for a while, and you’ve proven you have, I think we could find some common ground.”

Cardan sniffs. “Well, I may have to remain a little mean. For the sake of my reputation.”

“We’ll see.”

“You don’t want me totally defanged, do you?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

He laughs, then he lowers his head to nuzzle again, this time at the bite mark he left on my neck. I am flooded by his delight. From nearby, someone clears their throat. We look up to find a paramedic standing in front of us, face half-hidden by a surgical mask, patiently waiting for us to submit ourselves to examination.

“Oh,” I say. “Uh.”

Cardan, who is utterly without shame, is grinning when he straightens up. “Actually, we’re both fine, thanks.”

“That’s for us to determine,” says the paramedic. Something about him is oddly familiar, but his height and build are totally nondescript. Where could I have seen him before? “To start, we’re going to make sure you’re not concussed.”

Cardan just groans.

The paramedic bends at the waist and takes a penlight out of his pocket. “Just look into the light here for me.”

That _voice_. It’s the voice. I narrow my eyes at him. It is weird, on second thought, that he’s wearing a mask. It’s not like we’re possibly carrying an infectious disease. Cardan raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t move as the light shines into one pupil. “This is a surprise,” he says, without blinking. “And also, you have to admit, pretty dumb.”

“ _Suicidal_ ,” I hiss through my teeth. I’m strangely angry. They had to know what a risk it was to come back. They could have gotten away clean. “What are you guys doing here? If my dad catches you—”

“Are you going to tell him?” the Roach asks. He doesn’t sound too worried, which irks me.

I press my lips together, then say, “I should.”

Another of the paramedics kneels at my feet, his sandy head bent. The Ghost. Certainly less conspicuous than the Roach, with his scars. He’s tall, sure, but handsome in a way that’s totally generic. In fact, I’d have a difficult time describing him beyond “tall” and “symmetrical.” He picks up the leg that he shot to dress the wound, once again.

“We had to talk to you,” he says. Always to the point.

Suddenly I am sure that if I turned and looked behind me into the ambulance, the Bomb would wink at me from the driver’s seat. Part of me is relieved they’re okay, and the other part is baffled and horrified at my relief. But they did take care of us through some pretty gross and awful times. They kept me fed, kept me hydrated, kept us company. Maybe it’s natural to feel some degree of attachment.

“Why?” Cardan asks, baffled, as the Roach shines a light in his other eye. “You guys should be on a plane to Morocco by now.”

“Morocco?” I ask.

“It’s pretty. Also, no extradition policy.”

“Why do you even know that?”

Cardan shrugs.

“Look,” the Roach says, “we’re short on time. Your brother and Madoc are going to come over and tell you Dain killed himself out of shame when his plan was discovered. He left a note, confessing, yadda yadda. It’s bullshit. He didn’t commit suicide.”

“What?” Cardan and I ask, in unison.

I shake my head, as if trying to shake off our now unshakeable connection. “Then what happened to him?”

The Ghost doesn’t say anything, or even fully turn his head, but without lifting his eyes from my leg, he somehow indicates where Madoc and Balekin stand, in conversation with the police.

“No,” I whisper. It sounds naive, even to me, but I don’t want to believe Madoc is capable of those horrors, even though the fear our kidnappers expressed when they spoke of him seemed real. “No, it—Dain was a client, he and Madoc were friends—”

“Do you think that would matter if Dain went after Madoc’s family?” the Roach asks.

My stomach turns. “How do you know Dain _didn’t_ kill himself?”

“Because he wouldn’t,” Cardan says quietly. “He’s Dain. He’d think he’s clever enough to find a way out, even if everyone was closing in on him, and he’d probably be right.”

“We don’t know exactly what happened,” the Roach continues. He makes a show of fiddling with the stethoscope around his neck. “We just know that he was increasingly agitated about the way negotiations were going, and then we suddenly had no contact. I went to his office, then to his place. Coroner beat me there. Single gunshot wound to the chest, pistol with his prints on it. Seemed open and shut.”

I sense Cardan’s horror, and look to see that he’s gone pale. I lay my hand on top of his. Something tells me that he doesn’t have much of an issue believing that Balekin is capable of murder, even of a brother. And Cardan clearly didn’t like Dain, but what does that mean for his safety?

“You couldn’t have waited around and told us this in the basement?” I ask, feeling again like I am observing this all from afar, watching a scene in a movie that just happens to star me.

“We didn’t know what Dain told them before he died, so we had to clear out pretty fast. Left your stuff with the cops so you’d be found, left the door unlocked so you could leave whenever you wanted. Besides.” He raises one eyebrow. “You guys were busy.”

I flush; it’s true that Cardan and I couldn’t and wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere once we’d finally given ourselves over to each other. But all of this is too much. “Well, we can’t trust you.”

“You can’t trust your dad,” the Ghost says. “We’ve never lied to you.”

“You did _shoot_ her,” Cardan points out. “Most people would say that’s worse.”

The Ghost just shrugs.

“Look, believe us or don’t,” the Roach says. “But you have to admit that something’s rotten here. You’re going to need help. Eyes and ears. And I also hear that one of you is coming into a very large sum of money and a considerable amount of corporate influence in a little less than a year.”

“There it is,” I mutter.

But Cardan looks delighted. “Do you guys have a business card you can leave with me or something?”

“Are you planning to kidnap anybody?” I demand.

“No, but I _could_ use the help,” Cardan admits. “He’s right. Once I come into that inheritance, there’s going to be a huge target on my back.”

“We’ll call you. In the meantime, you’ve got a clean bill of health.” The Roach pats his shoulder. “Good for you.”

“Thanks, man.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see two figures break away from the detectives and begin approaching us. I say, “You’d better clear out.”

The Roach doesn’t thank me, but he gives me a little nod before disappearing around the side of the ambulance, whistling. That’s what passes for honor among thieves, I suppose. The Ghost remains, having drawn the short straw, his generically handsome features apparently working to render him inconspicuous.

“How is she?” Madoc asks him. I make myself look up at his face and try not to think about how, if what the Roach said is true, he might have recently pulled the trigger on one of Cardan’s brothers. The other brother stands next to him, looking less sour than before.

The Ghost stands. “They’re both good to go,” he says. “It looks like she sprained her ankle a few days ago, but it’s healing well.”

“The wound on her leg?”

“Nothing serious.”

Madoc nods, and then turns to me. The Ghost melts back into the scenery as though he wasn’t even there to begin with. No mystery as to how he got that codename.

Balekin stands at Madoc’s side, both men casting shadows across our knees. Madoc’s arms are folded, and Balekin’s jaw is set. I see his eyes find my hand resting on top of Cardan’s, but for some reason I am not at all worried about censure. Not from him.

Balekin says, “We’ve been given leave to take you back to your homes to rest, provided you return tomorrow to give your statements to the police. No one here wishes to… prolong your ordeal.”

“Wait,” I say, my heartbeat picking up in my chest. “Wait. Nobody’s told us what’s going on. Where’s Dain? How do we know he won’t try again?”

“He’s dead,” Madoc declares. “When he realized he wasn’t going to get away with it, that he had no other recourse…”

I swallow. I had hoped he’d say something else, anything else. “Oh. I see.”

Cardan covers his discomfort with a snicker. “Well, good riddance.”

“We’re hoping you can help us fill in the rest of the gaps once you’re up to sharing what, exactly, happened over the past five days,” Balekin says.

“I don’t know how much help we’ll be,” Cardan replies, shrugging loosely. “If it was Dain, we never saw him. And the guys who took us all wore masks.”

I’m surprised at how easily he lies, but maybe I shouldn’t be. I have to reevaluate everything I thought about his childhood; it probably involved a lot of lying to Balekin. Madoc doesn’t seem to notice anything, and it’s hard to get bullshit by him. He just watches me with a quizzical expression.

“Well, maybe you’ll remember something useful after you’ve had your rest.” Balekin jerks his head toward the waiting car, already beginning to walk away, assuming Cardan will follow. “Come on.”

Cardan glances at me with uncertainty, then begins to stand. I take his hand again and pull him back down. “No.”

Balekin turns around. “What did you say?”

I stand now, keeping hold of Cardan’s hand. “I said ‘no.’ I’m sure you have business back in the city. Cardan can come stay with us.” I look at Madoc and try to reassure myself that he is the safer choice. “There’s plenty of room in the house.”

“There is,” Madoc agrees, his tone carefully neutral.

“So it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

Balekin looks angry. He doesn’t want to lose his influence on Cardan. “That’s very generous, but I have just gotten my youngest brother back, and I’m not eager to let him out of my sight.”

“He’ll be under Madoc’s protection.”

“You have to admit, it does seem safer,” Cardan chimes in. He seems a little dumbstruck by the way the whole situation is unfolding. Maybe no one’s ever stood up to Balekin before. Certainly

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Balekin says, trying to loom over me. He is tall, but tall doesn’t faze me. “I’m his brother. I’ve been his guardian since he was a child. I _will_ be taking him back.”

“Well, Cardan isn’t a child anymore. He’s an adult, and I’m his mate,” I say, sticking up my chin. “And he is coming with _me_.”

I yank hard on Cardan’s hand, bringing him to his feet, and start off toward the car Madoc came in. Out of the corner of my eye I see Cardan, smiling, give his brother a shrug. “Omegas,” he says. “What are you gonna do?”

What, indeed. I don’t even know what I am going to do. Everything that happened in the last one hundred and thirty-two hours seems to have pushed us so much further down the road to a strange and dangerous adulthood. I don’t know if either of us are ready for what lies ahead, much less ready to defy our dangerous parental figures or negotiate the relationship we’ll have once I’m in college.

But it doesn’t matter, not right now. Because I have just pulled off a bigger heist than the Ghost, the Roach, and the Bomb could ever dream of. Because Cardan’s hand is in mine. Because his smile is, as always, contagious, so I am smiling too. Because we survived our trial, so maybe we can survive anything. Because he would choose me, and I chose him. Because neither of us is alone. Because he is my mate.

The rest, we’ll figure out when it comes.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to give you guys a little present to celebrate the end of the fic, so **[here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5CMNggSmTfpw56MVoC8krg?si=sr70X0pxStO0U6dFgPQIQQ)** is a playlist of songs I listened to while writing it! Some are serious, some are silly. They don't each correspond to a chapter or anything, but they speak to some of the key emotional story beats.
> 
> Thanks again to [Luna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkofthemoon), my beta, for patiently helping me through this fic. I couldn't have done it without you! Nor would I have stuck with it if not for you guys reading this _right now_ and all of your shares, comments, and enthusiasm. I owe you so much. ♥
> 
> You can find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/destiniesfic) and [Tumblr](https://judeling.com/) and here in the comments. If you want to recommend this fic to others, please share the [promo](https://judeling.com/post/635712977312645120/132-hours-a-folk-of-the-airomegaverse-au-rated) [posts](https://twitter.com/destiniesfic/status/1331389702788718592)! Thank you all so much for reading.


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